FW: Chips

[Ciciora Steve]

  I for one would _LOVE_ to play with some of these neat chips, but if you can
get only one (if you are lucky) or can't get the chip at all, then what's the
point?  I saw a review of a Bosch knock sensor chip in SAE'e rag and circled
number 41 for mor information.  Never got a response, so I made half a dozen
phone calls to track down the manufacture.  He wasn't even interested in
talking to me unless he could 'sample' me 50 of them at $25 each.  Was a realy
neat chip, and I might pay a little more if I could buy just one, but he had no
interest in that.  If memory serves, this chip had programmable width filters,
programmable center frequency, programmable gain, and outputs a digital signal
when it detects a knock (one bit).
- Steven Ciciora
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 I had an interesting conversation today with a couple of guys from our
Automotive design group. They were down for an "Engineering Excellence
Workshop" and were running a demo of an integrated knock sensor signal
processor. This thing (HIP9010) is controlled by a microprocessor bus
port, and does programmable gain, filtering, windowing and integration.
It produces an analog output voltage for knock amplitude. 

 One of the guys had a PC/Windows control demo running the IC against a
simulated sensor knock waveform generated from a digital recording. 
Pretty spiffy.

 The designers have very little automotive (i.e. greasy bloody knuckles)
experience; I talked to them for a while about my various mailing list
lurkings and my impressions of the garage tinkering and aftermarket
developments I see ongoing.

 They also had an eval board for the J1850 single wire automotive bus
interface products. 

 They seemed apprehensive about opening themselves up to a deluge of
e-mail, but if anybody has the urge to discuss these devices I am
not so shy. I broached the subject of samples to them; I think that
discreet inquiries could be handled, if it doesn't become a scene
from a nature show.