Project Help

[Eliminator]

Greetings all!

I have a few questions, and although i can handle a sodiering iron i am by no means an expert at eletronics, but i know enough to know which end of the sodiering iron not to touch when hot!

I am currently working on a project for a car.

I want to read the tach/speedometer/volt/temp/oil pressure then send this information to a PC to be displayed on a graphical screen. Writing the code isn't the problem, i have C++ knowledge enough to write it. What i need is a way to convert the signals from the engine to the PC. The Transmission has a place on it for a digital signal to be sent, and the tach just uses a pulse signal, the temp i have already figured out how to do and the volt. The Oil pressure and Speedometer are the ones i am having trouble figuring out how to read. Does anyone have an ideas on what i can use/build/buy for this?? Once i get all the signals set up i'll use an interface into the Parralle port to update the PC or if i can make it wireless which would be a better idea but first things first, the signals for the speedo and oil pressure.

Thanks,
Eliminator

[ante]

Hi,

If you want accurate speed sensing I suggest you use one of the ABS sensor for this. If you don

[MP]

eliminator, how are you with microprocessor chips? If you are familiar with them, then you might want to consider sending the information to the chip first, format the data in some way, then feed the data to the serial port of the PC instead. You will need other hardware to interface the parallel port to all of the different types of signals that you want. Some will be voltage levels and some will be pulses.

MP

[hotwaterwizard]

I have some cool circuits that may interest you so i will make several posts instead of one. Maximum attachment size allowed: 1000 KB That really sucks!!!

[hotwaterwizard]

More

[hotwaterwizard]

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[hotwaterwizard]

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[hotwaterwizard]

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[hotwaterwizard]

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[MP]

Wow! You have been busy.

I think the 1000KB attachment size limit is good since many have slow connections. It would slow down traffic on the site for larger uploads/downloads.

MP

[ante]

hotwaterwizard,

It

[hotwaterwizard]

I Did make the pictures smaller then they were worthless because you couldn't read the values and some of the lines were missing because of the size.

Most datasheets are bigger than that! I have all of these in a pdf file but it will not let me upload it. I thing PDF files should have a bigger limit!

[Kevin Weddle]

You certainly need an oscilloscope to determine how the siganal is changing. It might vary the pulse width(duty cycle), the pulse time, or the pulse amplitude. This is going to require a more complicated matching circuit. I would consult an electronics guy to develop the circuit.

[hotwaterwizard]

Here is what happens when you size it down. And convert it to GIF

Is it worth Posting like this?
I don't think so!
So stop complaining over pictures being too big for the browser or we could all suffer from the poor quality of the picture from it being so small that it is not ledgable or usable.

[ante]

hotwaterwizard,

I

[MP]

I thought jpg were the smallest package because of compression? Not so?

MP

[ante]

MP,
The gif files is the smallest type of picture files that I know of. They can be very small if you only use black & white witch in most cases is good for circuits. Anything with less than 256 colours will be small.

Ante ::)

[hotwaterwizard]

To get the smaller size in KB you have to reduce the size in inches. Another alternative is to try to get it into a greyscale format. But then the pixels are not as tight and you loose the detail. I think the sise limit is a big bother and it limits what you can post.

[ante]

hotwaterwizard,
Here is an example grabbed from one of my projects:

Ante ::)

[audioguru]

Ante,
That's a good comparison, they both look almost the same, even with nearly 3:1 compression.
What program do you use to convert GIF to JPG?
Will it also convert BMP (huge file) to JPG?

[ante]

I make a screen dump from ISIS to Photoshop and save as GIF and JPG. And the quality is definitely better in the GIF.

Ante ::)

[hotwaterwizard]

That is great until you get to a schematic with fine lines. I have several that I converted that way too. But when the quality is not there you run into problems. Convert the ones that I previously posted here and make a believer out of me.

[ante]

hotwaterwizard,

OK, I

[hotwaterwizard]

I scanned them from a book.

[Nettron]

What program do you use to convert GIF to JPG?
Will it also convert BMP (huge file) to JPG?

I use Irfanview, it can convert a great many file types. I mainly use its screen capture feature on the options tab, with it i can copy, save to a file and convert a screen image in just one click.

http://www.irfanview.com/