Before anybody says it I need to go straight to the elephant in the room, my engine is a v8, the Samdo is really meant for 4 cylinder 4 strokes but let's not worry about that right now, thee are far more important things to address.
I will admit that it was an odd choice but that has really been brought about by the IVA rules and the cost of a full traditional instrument set. The Smiths set on my mate's Dino cost nearly a grand and have been nothing but trouble, I really didn't want to go through that again. I have a set of cheapo gauges for water temp, oil pressure and volts that all work great, look fine and tell me the things that are all important. There is a massive choice of super cool gauges but none of them are IVA compliant because these days most are GPS so absolutely accurate but with our ridiculously slow moving DVSA, GPS devices are not allowed. Some have radii of less that 2.5mm on the bezels so that rules them out unless you can recess them into the dash.
The Samdo - also marketed under various other shit names - has a number of functions, which made it quite attractive. Firstly it combines tacho, speedo, fuel gauge, indicator warning, high beam and lights on warning, secondly it is programmable so it can be set to accurately read speed for any given size of tyre. The down side is that it's meant for motorcycles, which don't tend to be v8's. Thing is bikes do rev high, this unit can read up to 12k RPM, the Rover engine only revs to less than half that. This means that by setting it to read as if it's a 4 cylinder 4 stroke I can see how many revs the engine is doing, even though the numbers are twice as high as they should be - ie at 1000RPM true engine speed the tacho reads 2000. I can live with that. The convenience of having just one instrument cannot be ignored.
The other down side are the ridiculous instructions that come with the stupid bloody thing, fortunately numerous videos on youtube come to the rescue and tell you what to do. There is a secret menu for setting it up, it's a pain but once you get the hang of it it's ok.
A word of warning for anybody setting up a speedo for IVA - make sure the pickup is on the driven wheels, whether it is a mechanical or electronic device this is really important. The reason is that at some of the centers the test rollers need to be powered by the car being tested.6 If you have the sensor on the undrive6n wheels they can't test it, the car will fail and you will be 90 quid out of pocket. In the case of the Dino it meant another 5 hour round trip with the thing on the back of the transporter - it wasn't funny.
Another gotcha is the way the pickup for the tacho works - or rather - sometimes doesn't. Lots of modern cars with ecu's have an output specifically for the tacho, it usually outputs a square wave of 12 volt amplitude, no such luxury on the ancient Rover motor, where all you have is points. You need to connect the tacho input to the CB or contact breaker side of the coil, the tacho needs to be set to Y4 in the set up menu. Mine works great like that, I thought I might need to add some capacitors or something but it's fine like that, ignoring the previously described gotcha, obviously. The instrument isn't the fastest at responding or the smoothest but it's good enough for the IVA test - they need to know the revs when doing the noise test. i think some centers may have a strobe with tacho on it but I ain't taking any chances and have made sure I don't fail on this simple point.
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