sending units for gauges

On Fri, 02 Jan 2004 06:39:53 -0500, Kamus of Kadizhar rearranged some electrons to form:

Sounds like you are re-inventing the wheel...

I am - those are the senders I want to use, but I'm planning to build a tiny little computer to drive an LCD display to show the gauges. A learning and hobby project more than anything else.

-Kamus

On Fri, 02 Jan 2004 14:51:26 -0500, Kamus of Kadizhar rearranged some electrons to form:

Hey that's cool. I built a little 68HC11 computer on some breadboards a few years ago.. I was going to use it to control a robot but never got around to building the robot.

The 68HC11 series is pretty easy to use, but there are a whole bunch of others out there too. I just happened to get a free assembler and C compiler for it, so it made programming easy and cheap; I wrote a bootloader for my little board that could download bigger programs from a PC.

This is the one I plan to use:

Cheap - all of $22 - and comes with A/D converters and drives an LCD directly.

The development kit is all of $39, too.

-Kamus

On Sat, 03 Jan 2004 05:50:57 -0500, Kamus of Kadizhar rearranged some electrons to form:

Ah, Microchip PIC based. Popular microcontroller. I only have experience with Intel & Motorola stuff, though.

You do realize, of course, that the LCD displaythat it drives directly is an alphanumeric display... ie. text only? Not much for looking at while driving down the road.

I haven't been able to find anything comparable in the Motorola line - most of the 68HC11 stuff seems to be aimed at large OEMs, with professional development kits, hardware programmers, etc. or just the barebones chip with no supporting circuitry.

Well, I'm sort of thinking of a

LCD display - that way, I can get a few digits followed by a bar graph, and get 4 of them on a display. The letters on the display are 5mm - nearly 1/4 of an inch tall, so if the backlighting is good enough it should be visible.

If I understand the docs correctly, I can define my own characters, so I should be able to generate vertical bars of varying widths and thus get a bar graph of very fine grain. If I use 3 chars for the digital reading, then a space, then 16 chars for the bar graph, and each char consists of 5 vertical bars, I have 16 x 5 = 80 gradations, or a pretty continuous bar graph. And even if that doesn't work, 16 gradations isn't too bad....

-Kamus

On Sat, 03 Jan 2004 07:17:59 -0500, Kamus of Kadizhar rearranged some electrons to form:

True but there is some free stuff, too. Heck, I even found some source code for a Fast Fourier Transform routine for the HC11. Not that I would want to run such a thing with a 2MHz clock though zzzzzzzzz

I built my own development board on some perf-board. The hardest thing though was to solder to all those pins on the HC11 socket.

On the EEPROM versions of the HC11, about all you need to run a simple control system would be a crystal, and maybe a buffer or two.

Hey those are pretty cool. And cheap, too.