Customizing Your Real-Life Car with a Video Game Menu

Car modding is such a diverse hobby. Some people put obscene amounts of money into performance upgrades to shave 1/10th of a second off of their quarter-mile time, others spend that same mount of money on stereo components. But if you’re into things like LED interior lighting, DIY instrument clusters, and other electronic gizmos, you’ll want to check out this video game-style system for customizing a car.

Garage Tinkering has a Nissan 350Z that he’s been going hog wild on for a while now, adding all kinds of really neat customizations backed by electronic wizardry. You could spend hours exploring all the modifications he has showcased on YouTube, but the general idea is “what if Need for Speed was real life” and his 350Z now looks like a car from that game. As such, it has a lot of eye-catching mods, like accent lighting and custom gauges, that he can customize on a whim.

This system lets him perform those customizations in-car using a menu like you’d find in a video game, complete with a PlayStation controller for input.

That menu appears on a screen hidden in the sunglasses holder on the 350Z’s ceiling. Garage Tinkering can pop that open to reveal the screen and tweak things like the gauge cluster layout and LED lighting colors. An ESP32 development board controls the screen, receiving input over Bluetooth from the PlayStation controller.

Most of the modifications Garage Tinkering has done to the 350Z also have ESP32 boards and they all communicate through a secure private network, so tapping into that is easy enough.

But the project isn’t quite done yet. Garage Tinkering has already finished the majority of the firmware programming work, but he’s still figuring out the mechanical side of things. In fact, he may even take the installation in a slightly different direction with the screen popping out of the center console instead of the sunglasses cubby. Stay tuned to see how that turns out!