The first time I tried to post this, it wouldn’t let me. It said something about using a forbidden word, so I will try to post it in pieces, as it is pretty long.
Here’s the first piece:
I didn’t see a beginners section, so I posted here. Forgive me if it is in the wrong section.
Fasten your seatbelts because this is a long post.
My goal is to make custom analog style gauges for my car (and to learn along the way). I plan to use stepper motors for the needle movement, hence the microcontroller interest.
I want to make each gauge stand-alone instead of creating one box and plugging all of the gauges into it.
Q1. What microcontroller do I use?
Hold the flames please. I know this could really set some people off so let me narrow it down a little. I’ve done some research and decided to go with AVR. However, there are many AVR’s to choose from as you know. I believe that my application will be a piece of cake for pretty much any microcontroller but before I go buy parts, I would like to run it by people with experience. The sensor inputs range from analog to digital and -5V to +13.5 V or so, but I believe the highest rate of input (pulses/sec) is about 1KHz, coming from the speedometer. The following features would also be needed:
-The package would need to be solderable at home. I have a metcal with a pretty small tip, but I’m still thinking something that plugs in would be best.
-It needs to handle an automotive environment.
-The easier it is to drive a stepper motor the better
-Must have enough room for the code.
-Must be relatively inexpensive, hobby style package.
-I’d like to expand the microcontrollers duties from taking in a signal and controlling the stepper motor, to also, data logging the readings, adding a user calibration ability, and possibly a nifty start-up/shut-down “dance.” So I’d like to interface with say USB to program it and it would need to interact with some type of memory.