I think this article has a lot of good stuff.
If not used as described it does give a lot of great odds and ends information.
...Chrissi

I was extremely disappointed. With a little extra effort he could have
shown how to interface the sensors with a single chip microcomputer
and written and published a bit of source code. Nuts & Volts magazine
does that every month.

Apparently Jim Weir is stuck in an analog age.

Paul Lamar

Finn, why don't you write something up on what you did and submit it to
either Kitplanes or better yet... EAA Sport Av magazine? Send it to Ed Anderson first
he has a feel for making it interesting. I'll help anyway I can with
schematics clean ups and/or text suggestions. An 80C85 is better than
nothing.

Sport Av seems to be heading back to the experimental airplane
roots.... thankfully.

How about it Mike? Does this sound interesting?

Paul Lamar

Paul, the thing is that when you start talking microcomputers of any kind, you need to
invest in chip programming equipment. The reason I used the old 80C35 chip with an
external EPROM, is that I happened to have access to an old EPROM programmer at work.
True, the first in a series of articles could be how to build your own chip programmer
(for a printer port, for example). But the cost of that alone could well be more than $50
- which is more than what most of Jim's projects cost.

The only other alternative is for someone to produce and sell the PICs or EPROMS
programmed with the listed code for the project. But I'm afraid you then get into the
point of support "because it's so easy to make changes" and viability.

Finn

True on the 80C35 perhaps.
Using some of those PICs the program can be downloaded into a EEPROM
Electrically Erasable Read Only Memory through an RS232 interface.
Or something similar. Battery backed up static RAM also works.
No EPROM programer necessary. That cuts the cost
a bunch. There may be a 80C35 to PIC source code translator out there.
A lot of the PIC assemblers and BASICS are free.

We got some guys on here that do PIC stuff so perhaps you they could
convert your 80C85 source to PIC source and you guys could do a joint article.

We really need to start seeing some of this stuff because there is
so much interest in better instrument panels. Fewer steam gages.

The cost of my EGT/CHT scanner was well over $1500 when it could be made
for less than about $100 using this Analog chip and a PIC.
 
Paul Lamar
 
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