Yeah, it's like a big tease, isn't it. I don't mean it to be that way, but it is Ford (and Sumitomo's) fault it's so difficult with these units. I did try and enable the FPV Gauges in my car before I started working out the values I'd need to plug in to make everything work. Only 1 gauge works "out of the box" which is Voltage. All the other ones go to max when the ignition is on, or zero when it's off. G-Force does nothing.. but that's to be expected on a standard car.
Having seen what's happening, I knew I'd have to stop the real "fpv_gauges" program from running (otherwise it would interfere with my attempts). I quickly worked out the values needed (I had already gathered the ports from the fpv_gauges program - and now the gauges are displaying, it was easy to just plug in values until I understood them).
I say quickly, but I think I was having too much fun - I looked at the clock and it was 7pm! That's quite a few hours.
But the new software (after some testing on the bench) is now loaded in my car:
So, when the FPV Gauges are displaying, my little ones are disabled. Mine can be hidden too so they can be set to never display (I did that when I got touch events working). I think a real FPV only shows one of the two screens - as I couldn't work out how to flip that port's bit any other way... But, since I have touch screen events - I've coded it to toggle when I press the TRANS/VOLTAGE gauge. So I think that's better than a real FPV.
I took it for a quick spin around the block, boost and gforce is working the same as they do in my gauges - except very nice big numbers show now.
For the record, I think the FPV cluster (which shows some of these gauges too) is what's used to get the required messages from the high-speed
CAN BUS to the mid-speed one. So without that, there's no chance to get this working without building something like the little microcontroller I've described here. So no software only solution, sorry.