The Miniboard Again ...

[Rod Barman]

On Wed, 18 May 1994, Jonathan R. Lusky wrote:

> From what I understand, there are other single board systems available
> in the same price range that are much more suitable to this application.
> From what I gather about the miniboard, it 1) doesn't have enough
> memory, 2) doesn't have adequate inputs, 3) the motor drivers included
> with it are useless in this application.  I do believe that a 68HC11
> is the way to go, I just don't think the miniboard is well suited to
> this application.

1) I agree 2K seems tiny in todays 64 meg world but when you are writing
in assembler it's pretty big.  It's big enough for an ignition controller,
but I agree it would be too small for full blown engine management.
There are hc11s with more EPROM space (8K) but the download run cycle 
would be slower.

2) Has almost all the 'hc11 I/O pins brought out to headers (this is alot
of I/O when the 'hc11 is operated in single chip mode).

3)  Well, you just don't buy them or put them on the board.  These can
be used as generic high/low side drivers so they may still find a use.

In summary, I suggest we start with a miniboad ignition controller where
the coil driver/s and other extra goo is on a little protoboard, get that
working and then design a PCB that has everything we want on it for
an ECU.

Of course, I very pleased that Jonathan has agreed that the 'hc11 is the way
to go :-).  I would not cry too much if we went with the F1 board or something
like it.

--rod.

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