[announce] 68332 based ECM (efi332)

[Rod Barman]

> With that said, I would like to invite Rod to summarize the
> status and goals of efi332. 

Thanks for the invite.

For those of you who may not know, the MC68332 is a 68K variant
designed by Motorola and General Motors for engine control.  There 
are supposedly three in the new Chevy Blazer.  I've also 
discovered that Zytec engine management systems (used on some Ford
products in Europe) are also based on the '332.

My own experience with the '332 has been for robotic control.  I've
used a Motorola Business Card Computer module as the basis to control a
couple of different robots. More recently I've designed and built
our own '332 controllers using relatively cheap two-layer PCBs.  We use
the GNU tools to do all of our software development.

What I've proposed to John and started to work on is that we 
standardize on a "core" board based on a '332.  This will provide a
common environment at a relatively low cost upon which FI systems
can be built.  The board will have a bunch of connectors that will
allow lots of flexibility.  The PCBs will be available for personal
non-commercial use directly from the manufacturer (AP Circuits) and
should be really cheap.

As for time frame, I have almost all of the parts entered into the
cad system, schematics entered, etc. so after we get the remaining
issues resolved boards will be available within a couple of weeks.

Once everybody gets on efi332 we can sort out issues like which
connectors to use, memory size, development environment details, 
board shape etc.

Thanks --rod.

--
Rod Barman, IRIS ISDE-6 @ Laboratory for Computational Intelligence
University of British Columbia
rodb at cs.ubc.ca