The horns will be working together at some point AAACV8. I did feel slightly better this morning, so made an attempt at fixing the GPS speedo. Unfortunately on this bike, the original Veglia dials are missing and while the custom shop have made a nice binnacle to hold a single GPS speedo, the quality of said speedo is very questionable. The old owner of the bike included another one which made me instantly suspicious of it. Riding to and from the mechanics, the speedo was inoperative. I had a crack at the wiring to work out what was going on. It's a relatively simple setup: one power wire from 'ignition', one from the headlight circuit and a ground. I thought perhaps the ground was intermittent or the power wire was suspect (since the only thing that is reliable is the illumination) but I think both of the speedos are just cheap rubbish. They power up fine with the key in "on" but stop working during startup. Testing with a multimeter shows there is definitely enough power at the ignition terminal. Pulling and re-insterting the plug while the bike is running gets the speedo booted up again. I can only surmise there is a bit of a brown out when the bike is starting, which makes the positive voltage marginal for the speedo. On a lot of cheap microprocessors, giving them marginal voltage will crash them which I think is what is happening here. After thinking about it for a bit, including some stupid ideas like putting a reset switch in the circuit, I decided to cut the ignition power and run the whole thing from the light circuit. That way, I can reboot the speedo simply by flicking the light on and off and it's a good reminder to flick the light on before riding off. The problem I know have is that the Guzzi is a quality bike and this part is like somebody drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. So I've ordered a couple of different gauges from Ebay and I'll see which one floats my boat. I want one with a tachometer as well as a speedo, a few of them have a dial for the tach and a digital speedo that's driven off a magnet and a hall effect sensor which I think I'll like more. In the meantime, at least I will have some idea of how fast I'm going. I thought once I had it fixed I'd hop on and go for that first ride but...nope. Still got the collywobbles, best to defer it to the weekend.
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