This build turns a manual shifter into a smart display piece: a gear knob with a circular color screen on top that switches between '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', 'N' and 'R' as the driver changes gear. It sits in the center console of an Audi A4 and talks to a dashboard tablet running RealDash, so the readout updates with every shift. There is even an adjustable brightness setting, which seems like a must for night driving.
The construction is where this gets interesting. The maker designed the body around a TicWatch Pro 3, set into a knurled cylindrical shell with a diamond-grip texture on the housing. The screen sits in a black silicone mount, and the whole thing draws from the car's 12V supply through a step-down converter. That power arrangement sounds tidy, since it avoids any separate battery to worry about.
The backstory makes the material choice easy to respect. The first version was PLA, and car interior heat melted it, so the shell was reprinted in ABS inside an enclosed printer. The fit around the screen was also tightened up so the display stays put while shifting, and the maker cut down calculations to deal with response lag. Those are exactly the kind of fixes that come from living with a part daily.
Nothing is fully closed off here. The maker is looking into patenting the design, is open to suggestions on future print changes like material, texture or wall thickness, and the specific microcontroller, display module and gear-position sensing hardware have not been made clear. That last part is the big open question for anyone hoping to understand the full signal chain.