Do we know what we're doing?
Dave may have a point - we are primarily guarding against catastrophic oil pressure failures, the kind that result from a mechanical failure that either dumps all the oil on the road or disables the oil pump so that there is oil but no pressure. (Note that the first failure should illuminate the 'low oil' warning light while the engine still has good oil pressure; this happened to me once when I left the oil cap off of the engine.)
In either case, pressure could quickly drop to near-zero so an alarm at, say 3000 RPM and 1.5 bar really won't do much good -- you might gain a second or two at most, maybe not even that. OTOH, an alarm at 1.0 bar will be just as helpful at highway speed while in most engines not becoming a nuisance at idle.
My '87 300D would blink the alarm LED once or twice on a hot day when the engine came down from 3000 RPM to idle (perhaps due to a lag in the operation of the ELR circuit) but the '95 E300 with the same alarm has never done that. Both engines idle at about 20 psi as shown by the same VDO mechanical oil pressure gauge.
So maybe we should apply the KISS method here and not try to invent something requiring a 47-inch LCD-flatscreen-1070dpi TrueColor® TV set.
Jeremy
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"Buster" in the '95
Our all-Diesel family
1996 E300D (W210) . .338,000 miles Wife's car
2005 E320 CDI . . 113,000 miles My car
Santa Rosa population 176,762 (2022)
Total. . . . . . . . . . . . 627,762
"Oh lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz."
-- Janis Joplin, October 1, 1970
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