Old 486 Board for ECU??

[Gerald Pelnar]

At 05:20 AM 30/4/2000 +0200, you wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Gavin" <gavston at sprockets.freeserve.co.uk>
>To: <diy_efi at diy-efi.org>
>Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2000 10:44 PM
>Subject: Old 486 Board for ECU??
>
>ECUs are all about timing. Something PCs, no matter how
fast, are not really
>good at.

Sorry to contradict you (unless you are involved with
software), the common
486 motherboard has a heap of timers, cache, fast processor
(faster then
an 8 bit micro)  and some external interface through
parallel/serial ports
and keyboard.

There's nothing to stop you using the 486 board and a
patched version
of MSDOS - but boot from a flash card instead of a floppy
and provide
a SCSI drive for datalogging instead of IDE. Use DMA as
much as possible
and your CPU will happily handle a 12cylinder trundling
along at 16,000rpm.

There are projects for running PC's off 12v, you can get
1Farad capacitors
for smoothing and its not hard to locate the PC in the
boot.

Its a pity though the average 486 m/b package is so large.

It should be possible to just put a 486/cache ram/rom onto
a small board
and use your own O/S !

rgds

Mike

How about a 8088 in a 3 X 4 inch package for $27US
or a 386 for $47US? Bootable from flash ram, serial and
parallel ports, optional 8 bit 8 channel A/D.

www.star.net/people/~mvs

Gerald Pelnar
wd0fyf at mpks.net
McPherson, KS
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