I recently had the urge to subject myself to a field that i have avoided at all costs in the past. All of my circuits that I have designed thus far for automotive or any other application have all been done with logic, analog, TTL, CMOS, and all other base level Integrated circuits. I have avoided programmable IC's for a long time because they seemed complicated, also if you have ever taken a peek at Code written in C or C#, that is scary enough...
I purchased a little development board called an "arduino". This is a little board based around an Atmel ATMega328 Programmable MCU. The drivers and source code utilities are open source, meaning that they are free and shareable. There are examples in the code for beginners and tons of friendly tutorials online that explain the countless functions of this unit.
Ok, so what's it do?
Just about anything you want it to. If you think of it in terms of a controller, it has 13 Digital I/O pins that are pretty much switches. They are either on, or off. If your an LED nut like i am, this unit can loop through lighting sequences based on code combinations of actions and delays. I currently have a single LED light bouncing back and forth like a chaser on my board.
There are also analog pins. as opposed to digital ones, the analog pins are not only on or off, but hold a value. That value is the Voltage applied to that pin.
Say you have a resistor on your gas tank (as most do). that resistor returns a Voltage reading depending on how much gas you have. it may read 1V on empty, and 10V full.
apply this to an arduino unit, and with code you can say "When the tank V gets to 2.25V (1/4 tank) turn on pin 1..."
pin one connects to a LED on the dash that plainly tells you that you will need more gas soon.
everybodys car has this, but that is just an example idea...
what about a pressure sensor for Intake Manifold PSI in a turbo/SC setup? that information is invaluable!
maybe you want an ignition controller to advance or retard your timing for better gas mileage / power on the fly!
Maybe if your like me, you want enough LEd's to see your car from space, and the Arduino controls lighting schemes to make people think that it belongs there!
This is an extremely versatile board, the board with in circuit programmer cost about $40 (got mine on ebay) and after the chip is programmed, you can erase it and write something else, or pop it out, install it, and it costs about $4 for another one.
Ill have pics and some video clips of this thing in action soon enough. i have a few basic sketches to display...
