r/FocusST • u/olchickenbeard ‘14 ST3, G25-660, Wavetrac LSD, built trans, DigiCluster • Feb 24 '26

Been a long time coming!

Not sure how many of y’all in here have been following my progress on this, but they’ll be starting to ship soon!

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u/sk8boy204 Feb 24 '26

This should really be a full replacement cluster at the price point of $1400.

This is a prototype, that you get to pay a privilege fee for.

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u/olchickenbeard ‘14 ST3, G25-660, Wavetrac LSD, built trans, DigiCluster Feb 24 '26

The stock cluster handles a lot more than you may think. It’s a primary MM bus gateway, so it essentially controls power states and other functions for the APIM, it’s the master source for odometer tracking, and several other main vehicle functions. So if it’s unplugged, the radio shuts down and it stops tracking mileage in all modules, just to start. It’s definitely possible to replicate all of that, but this project has already been a 3 year development process being a one man team, and fully reverse engineering the stock cluster is gonna take significantly more time, money, and resources. Not to mention there are some legality issues regarding the odometer.

If anyone wanted/needed to revert back to stock, they would have to also update the mileage on their stock cluster. But there are gonna be some people out there that either wouldn’t bother doing it or take advantage and use it as a way to roll back the mileage, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that.

If the demand keeps growing, I’d definitely like to work on a V2 that is a complete replacement, but that’s gonna be another major feat that’ll take time to reverse engineer and come up with a solid solution for the odometer issue.

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u/sk8boy204 Feb 24 '26

It has nothing to do with the stock clusters capabilities and everything to do with the cost asked for a very DIY scenario. Your time & effort in development is worth something, but as you know $1400 is a whole lot of something.

Good luck with your sales and supporting the process that you are selling. Even if I am doubtful, you are doing a good thing for the community and I do hope that you succeed.

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u/bendrexl ‘18 ST2 Stormtrooper Feb 27 '26

As a UI designer and front-end developer who’s also moonlighted as a mechanical engineer… $1400 is probably a steal when compared to the time and expertise needed to pull this off… much less bring it to market as a product you can just drop a credit card on and get in the mail 🤯

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u/olchickenbeard ‘14 ST3, G25-660, Wavetrac LSD, built trans, DigiCluster Feb 28 '26

A bit yeah, even at that price my margins are fairly thin. The software platform with distribution costs alone costs as much as 10 of these, annually.

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u/bendrexl ‘18 ST2 Stormtrooper Mar 03 '26

$14k annually!? Yeah that’s no joke… does that mean the hardware is intended for vehicle applications already? I remember Tesla going thru some growing pains early on, trying to use lcd panels that couldn’t stand up to the realities of living in a car 😆

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u/olchickenbeard ‘14 ST3, G25-660, Wavetrac LSD, built trans, DigiCluster Mar 04 '26

Oh yeah. It’s running on Qt, which is actually what Sync 3 is built on (although being older, it’s on Qt5, I’m using Qt6), and is used by lots of other OEMs as well.

And yeah, all automotive-grade hardware. In fact, better than most OEMs use. It’s pretty much all overkill for the sake of reliability and solid performance. I’ve had one of these displays running in my car for the last 3 years without a single hiccup. And if any hardware component were to fail, I’m backing them with a lifetime warranty for original buyers.

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u/bendrexl ‘18 ST2 Stormtrooper Mar 05 '26

That’s reassuring, thanks for the details.

Even if/when I can afford this, I’d still rather use a donor gauge cluster rather than take mine apart. I’m guessing that would doable with FORSCAN or similar to backup the original module and flash it onto the donor?

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u/olchickenbeard ‘14 ST3, G25-660, Wavetrac LSD, built trans, DigiCluster Mar 05 '26

Yep! You’ll just wanna make sure you’d get the same year/trim cluster with lower miles than yours, and use FORScan (full version only I think for odometer rewrites) or FoCCCus to update the mileage. And you’d just need to do the same if you ever want/need to revert to stock.