PC's and EFI

[Sandy]

Everyone is getting a bit wound up on building something, I think it all
depends on what you are trying to do. The 4.77Mhz pc will work, but I'm pretty
sure that you won't get SFI and lots of the extras that a more sutable
processor will bring to the table. I'm very sure that if the goal is to
make it
simple, just whip out a couple of 555 timers and some FET's and connect a pot
to the throttle and you will have a simple injector (or a PIC). If that is
what
you want so be it, if you want to build something inexpesive, again, looks for
some processors that can do alot of the messy work, 8031's, 8051's, 80C535,
68HC11's, these are all very nice starting points to building a nice injector
or ignition system without a lot of BS PC based hardware. Cheep compilers,
assemblers, debuggers, and related freeware readly available. These processors
are in hundreds of thousands of cars, so they must work. By the time you fart
around with a PC, the Operating system, floppies, and that crap, you could
have
hardware that is a 10th of the size and won't die when you hit a pot hole.
Remember you could be out on a dark road and how nice it would be to see
'General Protection Falt at address 0x12345'. The whole design, electrical and
physical of a pc is just wrong, end of story. If you want to get access to you
controller buy an old laptop, or better yet, get a windows CE machine, I
have a
compaq that has the terminal emulator and a RS232 port and you now have a pc
interface. They can't give away the some of the CE machines, so the price is
low, runs on battery's and you can cram a large flash card to store your data.
Hey don't get me wrong, I would love to write my software in Delphi and use a
PC, but this would only end up as another one of the scrapped project that has
lots of wires soldered to the back of it with a label that says 'Wasted Time'.

Let the flames begin.

Sandy
UP LATE, CRANKY, and CAN'T FIND MY DAMM POINTY HAT...OOPS, ITS ON MY HEAD.