I’m buying new meters, since I need three of them to look the same and just wanted to save myself the trouble of soldering an additional resistor in place if I didn’t have to. 5V meters they shall be!

Again, many thanks for your patience.

No not 5 amps. Meters work on very low currents. A series resistor is used to convert voltage to current for the movement. A meter might swing to full scale with 1mA so if you want full scale at 5V you would use a 5K resistor. 5V dropping on 5K would be 1mA.

To make a current meter a shut is used. The shunt is basiacly a small value resistor in parallel with the meter. Most of the current flows though the shunt with a small amount passing though the meter movement.

The scale on the face of a meter may not tell you anything about the movement. In most cases the meter is setup to act as the face indicates but not always. A 5Amp meter might really be a 1mA movement meant for use with a shunt.

Also, for clarification, you mean a meter with 5 amps, not 5 volts, correct?

You need a meter that has a 5V movement if you don’t want to add an external resistor. Meters usually work on current and 1mA movements are common. You can make a 1mA meter movement work with about 5K of series resistance.

I have also found that you can open many meters and remove or replace an internal resistor to get the desired voltage range. This resistor is usually connected directly to the internal connection terminals. Be careful as it is very easy to damage a meter either physical or via too much current burning out the winding.

Thanks in advance.

use a 4.7K or 5.1K resistor in series to your meter from any Arduino PWM compatable output pin. There are 6 to choise from. Ground the other side of your meter. Use the AnalogWrite funciton and your meter will go from 0 to full scale with values from 0 to 255.

Thanks!

You need to close LCDSmartie when you upload. Only one applicaiton can use the serial port at a time, this is true for the USB interface as well as a hardware serial one.

The problem may be in your decoder code. I beleive LCDSmartie sends all the messages back to back so one decode function my be affecting another. Also check how you handle CR/LF in case that could be getting you.

I recomend starting with only one parameter from LCD Smartie. Test all you can with a single data value and your decoder. Since you have mulitple indicators you may have used multiple messages from LCD Smartie, if so, activate them one at a time. If you used a single long message, try one feild at a time. Also do these steps with the terminal instead of LCDSmartie. Look for a case where when you add one more of the steps to the configuration, things stop working. That will be the clue you need to isolate the problem.

Thanks!