I have about decided to do a single chip solution to
  the dwell ignition problem  because  potentially it is the
  cheapest way to do a stand alone ignition for use with a carb.
  The knowledge gained can then be used to do a variety of simple
  things including a trim table adjustment to the 555 fuel injection
  system using spread sheet data as suggested by Henry Nee.

  I will focus on assembly language as these are time critical jobs
  and with assembly language you always know how long
  it takes to do anything. If you keep the job  short and
  simple the software size will be manageable from many aspects.

  Further more I have considerable experience with assembly
  language much of which can be applied to the AVR instruction
  set.

  I realize that most of you will not be interested so you
  can delete the messages on the subject.

  Those that wish to follow along can make a folder and move
  the stuff over to that.

  Tom Walter, I think, was the first to mention the
  Arduino board as a good low cost and small AVR trainer that will
  do a variety of jobs. The advantage is it is wired
  for USB and there is programming software that runs
  on both Windows and Linux.

  There are a lot of people using this board around the world so there
  should eventually be a lot of asm code examples.

  The Arduino Mega 2560 is a small microcontroller board based on the
 ATmega2560.
  It has 54 digital input/output pins (of which 14 can be used as
  PWM outputs), 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), a 16 MHz
  crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a
  reset button. It contains everything needed to support the
 microcontroller;
  simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable.

  We will be using only a very few of these capabilities but the cost
  and size is so low it does not matter.

  AVRA is an assembler for Atmel AVR microcontrollers, and it is almost
  compatible with Atmel's own assembler AVRASM32.

  The initial version of AVRA was written by John Anders Haugum in 1999. He
  released all versions until v0.7. All later versions were released by
 Tobias
  Weber. And version 1.3.0 is released by Jerry Jacobs.


  Paul Lamar

 Runs on a Mac too.  This is the board we are using in the Mechatronics
 courses at the University of Utah.  Mostly for automated robots with lots
 of sensors.

 Chris Cosman

Paul,

The AT90USB Demo-Kit sells for 31.00 on Digikey and I think provides
similar resources, plus has some external flash storage that might help for
storing tables.  Check it out, as it could be a cheaper alternative.

Thanks,
Brannon

That is a bargain. I had to call and confirm it was completely assembled.
That beats the Arduino for our purposes. Thanks for finding that Brannon.
I ordered one.

Paul Lamar