SystemCheck COMMANDER Tachometer Gauge

Information about Evinrude I-Command, ICON Pro, and ICON Touch Color Displays
jimh
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SystemCheck COMMANDER Tachometer Gauge

Postby jimh » Thu Jun 18, 2020 9:17 am

A very early gauge offered by Evinrude was the SystemCheck COMMANDER Tachometer gauge. This gauge was not a NMEA-2000 device. The gauge had a dial pointer tachometer, a small LCD display, and three input buttons, which was a configuration later seen in the early I-Command NMEA-2000 gauges and then again in the much later NMEA-2000 ICON Pro-series gauges.

systemCheckCOMMANDER.png
Fig. 1. The Evinrude SystemCheck COMMANDER gauge.
systemCheckCOMMANDER.png (30.46 KiB) Viewed 5763 times


The OEM of the SystemCheck COMMANDER was FARIA. The device required use of an in-line fuel flow sensor to measure engine fuel consumption. It was also able to use a electrical fuel tank level sender to monitor fuel tank level. And the device tracked engine hours on the basis of the presence of a tachometer signal from the engine, a much better method than just counting time for the ignition key position to be in RUN. The dial pointer tachometer was actually a stepper-motor digitally-controlled pointer, operated by a digital tachometer. Use of stepper motors to control dial-pointer gauges was innovative in marine instrumentation at the time of introduction c. 2003, and the digital tachometer provided higher accuracy.

The FUEL MANAGER function could display the rate of fuel flow, totalize the volume of fuel used in two totalizers, TRIP FUEL USED and TOTAL FUEL USED, and compute FUEL REMAINING based on the fuel flow measured. The FUEL TANK LEVEL was displayed based on sensor input from a tank level sender. Alarms could be set to warn of low fuel levels.

Aggregation of all these functions into one compact gauge was unusual at the time.

In addition, the SystemCheck COMMANDER gauge was also wired to the engine wiring harness SystemCheck connector. Instead of annunciator lamps, the gauge displayed text messages in the LCD display for ENG HOT (for engine temperature above normal from a thermostatic switch), LO OIL (for oil reservoir below threshold from a float switch), NO OIL (from a flow sensor in the oil system), and CHK ENG (from a signal from the engine management module based on several possible fault conditions).

The SystemCheck COMMANDER gauge was quite innovative in providing to the user many configuration settings and options that could be selected using the three user input buttons.

The publication "Evinrude Owner's Manual SystemCheck Commander Tachometer" is archived at

http://continuouswave.com/whaler/reference/BRP/SystemCheckCommander.pdf