Focus/Agenda

[Rod Barman]

Hi all,

Since no one asked for it, I'll give you my opinion on what we should
be doing :-).

Let's take a two prong approach.  First, let's start engine management
by designing a ignition controller based on some microcontroller (the
miniboard, the miniboard, the miniboard !!!) and get a bunch of people
using that.  We can start real simple and move on to fancy things
like knock control. 

Then when we got our map reading routines, lap top communications,
trouble codes :-) down we can move up to FI.

Second, (and this is a pet project of mine) let's also work on 
an engine monitoring system based on a PC laptop and either
through the parallel port or through a serial line to the 
same controller.  Here I prefer the PC parallel port driving
an optically buffered fancy multi-channel A/D and software.  We
can splurge and by the Sun electric high tension lead sensor
cables.

Finally, to those of you who really, really want to use XXX processor
you can always follow along at home on your own system.  You may
want to pick up a miniboard anyways so that you can make your project
car run in the meantime :-).

--
Rod Barman, IRIS NCE @ Laboratory for Computational Intelligence, 
University of British Columbia
rodb at cs.ubc.ca