[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGWEtLOT4cc[/youtube]
recently I tried it on a real car, a old VR shitter that had seen better days, the gearbox wasnt terribly great... so it wouldnt matter if I stuffed something up
so I made up a loom off an old auto loom and dymod up all the wire labels, and plugged it in. I was running out of light fast so the video isnt real good. it shifted exactly as intended, a little slow but this box is old and half stuffed... and there is no way that the controller is slowing anything down, the solenoid drivers are instant. it flared going into third a little bit, again probably due to the state of the gearbox. a quite interesting note is that this is mainly only useful for upshifts, as leaving the stick in D means there is no over run clutch engaged and no engine braking... you can shift it back and not feel a thing if you are off the pedal... this video was fun to make as I had the controller in a bucket at me feet and head to lean down to push the shifting buttons... forgot to rotate the phone too. [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaDPeMm2Ca8[/youtube]
so next steps are to connect up the range switches from the gearbox to my arduino so I can sense the stick position and have the controller just apply the solenoids to suit the stick position directly. then the up and down shift buttons are not needed really, but you will still be able to over ride the stick and shift into any gear below the current stick position using the buttons (great for drag racing). once ive written the code for that, ill use a curly phone cord to hook up the switches onto the steering wheel, and an ethernet cable to extend the 7 segment display to reach the dash.
then go and have some fun in the paddock.eventually ill get a few proper pcb's printed up to make it nice and neat. it could be subject to feature creep too if I could be bothered
the arduino has enough inputs to do RPM, VSS, and TPS too, which mean I could enable serial communicaiton and have tunable shifting tables and tunerpro logging too, but that sort of code is well beyond my abilities to write at the moment... so anyway, I know standalone controllers exist already, so im not doing anything new, but going out and buying a ready made working unit would be no fun now, would it 
. also finished the range switch code so it will shift into whatever position you move the stick to, but also let you use the steering wheel buttons to shift into any gear below the current stick position. seems to work on the bench well, so sometime between now and the weekend ill take it back out to the VR and give it another run.