MPGuion program size question?
 

From what I've read, there seems to be a lot of features left out of the MPGuino due to the size limitations of the memory. Is there any reason that the Atmega328P-20P chip is not being used. It has twice as much memory as the Atmega168P-20P chip that is being used in the MPGuino currently.

I think the main thing was trying to build a smooth development path. So the easiest thing is to get V1.0 using the existing arduino platform with the features being a basic mpg unit. The current system is very good and I would consider it a 1.0 for most purposes. I have one in all my cars now and will be installing a few more for friends in the next few months.

I think for V2.0 it will need a bigger chip in order to be able to do all the neat stuff that was talked about like calculating aero drag and rolling resistance. But I don't know of a well defined road map to the project yet. DCB is pretty much the project manager/main developer so he would be the one to know about the future plans for it. I am just now getting up to speed on the whole arduino library set and will hopefully soon be helping him do some coding to it.

There are a fair number of folks with 168's and so that has to be the target for 1.0.

But there is also an availability question, I managed to get a hold of one 328, but they are not in stock anywhere. I would wait until it looks like it sticks before putting application dependencies on it myself.

The only thing I can think of to do in the meantime to reclaim a substantial amount of storage with this chip is take all the C fluff and bootloader out of the picture and dig into assembler (which I have started) and eventually offer a program on a chip. I don't think most people actually care about being able to program, they just want a simple and inexpensive mpg gauge.

But as it stands mpguino don't fit in arduino 0012, and that has made me seriously reconsider arduino for anything beyond the 1.0 mpguino offering. But arduino sure did make it easy to get started though, I must say :)

I ordered an extra 328 chip with the kit from spiffie and just got it put together.

I recompiled the code for the 328 and it seems to work OK so far playing with the screens, though I still have to finish wiring it up into the car to really test it out.

Compile size increased from 14k to 17k for some reason so there's 3k gone but still 13k left to play with. If that gets short there's always the sanguino which has 64k.

Thank you dcb for all the great work you've done! This thing makes a good simple starting platform to expand into a whole range of monitoring features.