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From: TLC (all posts)
Date: 2000-07-06
Subject: Re: HW Q

Hi!

> well I know that home computers are not the best solution.
> but I dont want to bother with the PCB, coding a microcomputer,
> burning EPROM's, etc... I'm not a professional mechanic, this
> would be an experiment only. A simple method to measure
> exact 0-100kmh (60mph) acceleration. (Drawing the
> rpm / ingnition timing graph is a bit more difficult I aggree.)
> ...anyways, thx 4 the info. gonna check the URLs.

Still, as Tim wrote, your best option is a microcontroller. You probably remember some obsolete Intel based micro designs that included EPROMS and a lot of TTL logics / professional board etc. but this is all about the past. Today, for example you can get an AT90C2313 microcontroller,
that provides a small RISC CPU core running at up to 10Mhz, 2K Flash program memory, 128 bytes RAM, 128 bytes EEPROM, an on-board oscillator,
15 freely programmable I/O pins, a full featured RS232 UART, two timers with a lot of useful options - all this in a DIP20 package for about
8-900 HUF. Atmel provides both the documentation and the basic programming tools (crossASM and stuff) for free. The 'burner' itself, is a small board containing just one 74HC244 bus driver chip, connecting to the LPT port of the PC (commercial programmers are also available).

The timers of the AVR seem to be quite promising, since they're both able to count pulses of an external signal. You can, if you want, also measure the pulse width of a signal, since the TMR1 can, like the SID,
capture the timer's value when the level on the input line rises or drops (configurable).

The display, in such a design, could be a block (line) of LED's as seen is such applications. If this is not enough, LCD displays with serial interfaces are becoming cheap. For example, Batron manufactures 16
character x 2 line matrix displays that you can buy for about 2-3-4000
HUF.
(See docs and application notes on Atmel's site, they're all quite interesting - I learnt a lot from those (both with Microchip's and Parallax's such documents).

L.