MSP430 Boost Gauge

[Eeyore]

So ive been thinking... At university i worked quite a bit with embedded systems and still have all of the bits left over. Basically with a microchip you have two pins for power and earth and the rest can receive input either on or off (0/1) or analogue input 0 to 255.

With these pins you can connect lots of sensors... perhaps a pressure sensor which they could be connected to the inlet manifold to measure boost pressure. Then of course you need some way of displaying the information, which is done using an old backlit nokia screen.

Then lots of programming stuff needs to happen and you need to turn the input value from the boost sensor into pixels on a screen. You dont just print the letter A or the number 3. You have to write code to turn each and every pixel on and off!

But would it be cool? Would you guys be interested in seeing the results of a home brew electronic boost gauge with a screen?

Problem so far is I cant find a pressure sensor that fits directly into a pipe D:

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Just found this! Its perfect! Bit expensive but exactly what I need as you can plug the tube straight into it and it measures between 3 and 36psi!

http://www.trossenrobotics.com/p/phidget...ensor.aspx

[DarkInferno]

http://uk.farnell.com/honeywell-s-c/asdx...dp/1784673

they also have a 0-100psi version if 30 isn't enough.

[Eeyore]

oh wow! Epic find DarkInferno! Thats a lot cheaper and probably a lot easier to interface with! Much love x

[DarkInferno]

it was either spi or i2c I think so should be easy enough to work with..... the 100psi one was analogue I think..

only quickly browsed though....

[samass]

That'd be pretty awesome tbf dude

[DarkInferno]

I considered making a multi function dial... boost pressure, egt, intake temp, oil temp, voltage type thing

potentially using a little lcd type thing so the the dial would change to suit the ranges it would need to display

[Eeyore]

yeh i was thinking something along those lines. Just boost to start with and maybe a graph of it changing over time. And maybe some on screen on off controls for other things.

[zx_volcane]

Using pic processors for embedded?

Might be easier grabbing an arduino board, development time and coding is much quicker, plus can upload code via usb rather than using a programmer.

although a pic soldered on a little bit of protoboard would be a lot smaller.

you can get a digital boost gauge up and running over serial write to lcd in about 10 minutes flat

*edit, just bothered to read thread title properly, you're on a MSP430! Lol does anyone use pics anymore

[Eeyore]

I use the MSP430 series and Code Composer studio 5. Probably wont take me 10 minutes but ive never used the arduino stuff!

[Piggy]

how fast though would this be?!

[zx_volcane]

I use the MSP430 series and Code Composer studio 5. Probably wont take me 10 minutes but ive never used the arduino stuff!

arduino is just piss easy to code, has libraries for lcd ..etc >>

eg:

lcd.print("hello, world!");

and you can chuck info back and forth over the usb serial connection

I had a realtime graph of boost vs requested + other realtime parameters for my vnt at one point - looked mint on the laptop

[Ruan]

Yeah, seriously, learning a bit of Java and being able to implement Arduinos LCD and various other Data libraries will still be faster than programming a PIC to do what you want...

PICs are great for real low level stuff and are VERY tried and tested in many applications, but for most other things that aren't critical, you may as well take advantage of the high level coding you can do on an Arduino or similar... There's also the new ones which are 32bit like the Arduino Due and the Atmel AVRs for even more advanced stuff you can do!

[Eeyore]

might have to look into the arduino stuff then. Sounds a lot better just printing to the LCD instead of using SPI to interface with it D: