PRH111
Ex Member
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I want to do this simply for the challenge of it. It will also give me a nice big fat line on my resume if I ever decide to get out of RF theory and go into the embedded design/ microcontrollers field.
I am going to try to start on a Microchip PIC 16F88 chip (8 ADC I/O pins, 16 I/O pins total, CCP, PWM, UART, MSSP, 20MHZ, 4K memory, 352bytes of ram space). If need be I'll go to a more powerful chip later but the 16F88 runs about $4. The most expensive part (other than my time) would be the PCB...on small orders it can be as high as $60 per circuit board on a 6" X 7" circuit board.
I plan to do my testing as such: Drive in the morning when it is cool, then day when it is warmer. Then I'd do a morning drive to a nearby mountain (you can get to 7000ft elevation by vehicle on mount rainier). Followed up by the mid-day warmer drive back down the mountain. Final tests would be me riding every single time we get rain here (quite often) to make sure the electronics are sealed up well against humidity. I figure 3-4 months to program the MCU, 3-4 months to put it all together and another 2-3 months of testing.
The only problem is I can't do miniaturization of the circuit as I have very little experience dealing with surface mount components so if there are any electronics assemblers with that type of experience out there I'd like to make arrangements with you...I'll engineer the system but you slap it together. Other than that the circuit board will be somewhat large (6" X 7" is what I envision currently)...
I am avoiding closed loop to keep it simple. If desired maybe I'll build in an option to accept input from a wide band bosch O2 sensor but that is a hefty project in itself.
Lucky for me I'm not married so my free time away from work is my free time to work on whatever projects I want and I'm sure my kids would love to be involved anyways.
Tentative start date is September.
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