This project came from two things: the desire to scratch an itch and more than a bit of serendipity. The “itch” was that I wanted a hackable, customizable gauge I could use in my project car without spending an arm and a leg on an off-the-shelf commercial option. The first bit of serendipity came when I happened to notice that Adafruit’s 16 Neopixel ring is just about exactly the right size to fit in a standard 52mm automotive gauge holder and the Waveshare 1.28” round LCD is almost the right size to fit inside that. From there it was easy to see that a couple 3D printed parts could hold things together nicely. The second bit of luck came in the form of the cornucopia of boards based on the ESP32s2 which are available with tons of PSRAM, a bunch of flash storage and a built-in support for speaking the CANbus protocol.