Signal Generator
 

Not sure where this goes, but it is basically two duinos. One (the plain chip and crystal) has been programmed in arduino to simulate a vehicle vss and injector signal, and the other is running the mpguino code. The test code is at the bottom. Now it isn't single digit microsecond accurate, but it also isn't limited by the number of timers either. With this approach you can generate a lot of different signals, i.e. buttons, etc. And since both the guino and the signal generator are connected to the computer simultaneously it is quite possible to have a PC program with all kinds of scenarios that tell the signal generator what to generate and get the result from the gunio to see if it is correct.

http://ecomodder.com/wiki/images/c/c...generator1.JPG
http://ecomodder.com/wiki/images/d/d...generator2.JPG
http://ecomodder.com/wiki/images/4/4c/TestWiring.gif

What is the signal logic on the VSS and injector line? I'd like to make an interface for my carputer to do FE calculations.

It is basically a 5 volt square wave defined by these lines in the code:

#define sig1PinOffTime 2444
#define sig1PinOnTime 25333
#define sig2PinOnTime 16000
#define sig2PinOffTime 2180

sig1 (simulating the injector signal) is off for 2444 microseconds and on for 25333 microseconds, roughly.

sig2 (simulating the vss signal) is on for 16000 microseconds and off for 2180 microseconds, roughly.

So you going to start from scratch, or can you help us troubleshoot the guino? It would be downright trivial to send the instant raw data out the serial port on the guino and collect it on the carpc and make sense out of it there. I do it all the time for debugging.

You beat me to the end. :thumbup: My 555 is working, but not very precisely. While its accurate, without a scope, I'm having trouble zeroing in on trustworthy streams.

So, let me get this straight, you have a basic ATMEGA168 chip, that you loaded using your Freeduino board, or the load cable, then placed that code loaded chip to your solderless breadboard with the bare bones components for a functioning chip. You then power it from the same place as the MPGuino and tap its outputs.

I may just have to break down and buy some more Freeduinos to catch up. :o

My soldering iron is heating up so I can migrate my LCD and input interfacing components to a proto shield. I'm trying to make mine look less like a spaghetti ball on the bench.

That's pretty much it. I bought some 20mhz PDIP atmega 168's and some 16mhz crystals after I cooked one atmega, then wrestled a bootloader on them by putting them in my freeduino board socket and mucking around with the parallel port ICSP programmer (not for the faint of heart), then I could program it via the USB/Serial port on the board and use plain old arduino IDE and code.

NCK had some chips with bootloaders on them, but no crystals, and when I looked they did not have chips in stock, so as hokey and painful as the parallel programmer can be to get working, it has proved to be invaluable. It's brought back a couple chips after experiments that have gone wrong and cost me nothing :)

Course the real nice thing about this arrangement is that I can create cheap little devices, but anybody with a duino can also use what has been written very easily.

Edit: I was just checking out the iduino and noticed that fundamental logic, http://www.spiffie.org has atmegas with bootloaders preloaded and crystals, as well as a breadboard usb duino kit for $18! I had to get one at that price (plus a couple more atmegas and crystals)

Great work DCB. Thanks for all your help on this project as far as debugging the software (and writing it hahaha).

I may build one of these with my spare board. I always buy spares when it comes to components....I've got a habit....

I got my cluster of wires pushed to the proto shield from NKC. But, then ran into several issues.

The first was the size of the holes are tight for the Zener diodes, or if you have larger watt resistors. Not a big deal, but does require some persuasion and the small area makes it challenging.

The second problem is more of an issue. Basically, the trace across the center of the board for 5V is not connected, just solder pads; the ground is OK.

I contacted NKC and they acknowledged my find. They were prompt, but I would wait for a new generation board before getting another proto shield from them.

All in all, it went great, aside from the issues with "placement on the fly". And, it looks good, piggy backed on the Guino. Still not as compact as a custom PCB setup, but very friendly for plug-and-go with any Freeduino board, snap in, snap out.

I'm waiting for my other Freeduino's to arrive so I can assemble the generator and get back to testing this thing.

Have you changed or updated your generator code? I've got it running on a 2nd Freeduino, straight inputs, not resistors.

It looks like I'm showing 55-58 mpg. Is that what you are getting?

I show MH 40.0x and MG ~57.

Not related directly to the generator, when I display the CPU % screen, it seems to revert back to the startup, like a reset as the MI reverts back to near 0.

I get it if I cycle left once, or right 6 times.

I'm not quite sure if it's the code somehow resetting the CPU or something else. Version 0.61.

The generator makes it nice to see it actually running.

I've not touched the signal generator code since fixing the 72 minute issue. I do keep messing with the microseconds per gallon and vssTicsPermile though but 57/58 mpg @40mph sound just right for the last version.

re:reset, currently , hitting left button and middle button simultaneously will reset the tank trip, hitting right and middle will reset the current trip. Is it possible that the middle button is getting "fat fingered" when hitting the left or the right button?

I've checked and the buttons don't appear to be solder bridged or anything. And the buttons are far enough apart to not likely be fat fingered. But, it also happens if I right button to that screen, also.

But it appears to be resetting the program, ie running setup() again.

With my current configuration, if I press the reset button on the Freeduino the LCD goes "one line" on me - known issue. This doesn't happen, so I'm not quite sure it's a full on restart, but like it's just running setup() again somehow. I went looking through the Guino code, looking for a possible hosed pointer or something, something where a memory address is getting trounced. Nothing jumped out at me. It could be a memory corruption or allocation/deallocation issue within the arduino program code. A bit far fetched maybe. Does it not happen for you?

I've never witnessed that behavior and I have tried to reproduce it, lots of fast rights and lefts, casual lefts and rights, hundreds in a row, no problemo.

FYI, on the plan for the signal generator program (eventually) is to add button signals too.

If you want to give that a go, the resistors are cheap insurance, I do have actual, non speculative, first hand experience with cooking a chip by connecting them directly :) The pin states may not be in a known state when the chips boot up and they may not boot up perfectly in sequence, or you just forgot what code you had on one of the chips :o. so two pins could be in output mode (non-low impedence) and one high and one low and that's all it takes.

Maybe I wasn't very clear. When I display the CPU screen, I see what appears to be a single update, then the apparent reset.

I'll plug in some resistors to see how it goes. Currently, both Freeduino's are powered from the same 12v source (bench power) with a split pigtail for the power jacks, so a common ground. Since the Guino code is vastly larger, I'm speculating that it comes online after the test generator, but, you're right, that's no guarantee. My two Freeduinos are not easy to mix up as the Guino one has the proto-shield with the LCD and the generator is just a plain board. Yes, I suppose I could have uploaded the incorrect program, but I think I'm better than that ;).

I think I'll update the generator to put a signature pin 13 blink sequence or something to it will be obvious when it's functioning.

Hmm.. Can you try commenting out all the lines inside doDisplay7()? Should just have a nonsense screen for CPU Monitor hopefully instead of a quasi-reset.

I'll give that a try this evening when I get home.

I tried...
 

It appears the the memoryTest() function is the culprit - on 2 different Duinos. I've commented it out completely, and it works; I've commented out the while loop and it works. Something in the allocation routine is amiss, like maybe the processor is getting trounced - at the moment it needs memory, the program has it allocated, so it resets.

I've modified it as follows, what do you get on the serial? I changed it to an unsigned long to match the data type in the calling function, but no luck. I even added the check before the final deallocation.

On count by 1 (ie byteCounter++), I get:
For += 10, I get:
Any help?

Here's what I get, no problem there, about time for another round of optimizing though :(

instant: 0,44072,18,27
current: 0,879320,360,550
Memory: 10
Memory: 20
Memory: 30
Memory: 40
Memory: 50
Memory: 60
Memory: 70
Memory: 80
Memory: 90
Memory: 100
Memory: 110
Memory: 120
Memory: 130
Memory: 140
Memory: 150
Memory: 160
Memory: 170
instant: 0,46516,19,28
current: 0,925836,379,578

Ok, my next stab might be something like: something different between our ATMEGA's, like maybe a different generation of boot loader software, some memory management issue. I've tried it on two different Duino's bought weeks apart, so that doesn't seem very likely..

But, I'm willing to consider other options, as well.

What about your coding IDE? What platform are you using? I'm using v0011 on Ubuntu 8.04. Even though it's supposed to be the same, might there be a difference in the bytecode generated?

I haven't ruled out my proto board, either. Tonight I'll try running the Duino on just the board itself, no peripherals and just trigger the left switch and watch the trace.

Hard to imagine something external messing up malloc(), I would suspect linux is the key difference here. Are you using a script to start arduino (run.sh or something)? I know strange things can happen in windows if you do not use the script, there is less possibility of linking in the wrong malloc on windows too ;)


I tried 0010 and 0011 fyi, on a lot of chips. Some that I had used the IDE to load the decimillia bootloader on too.

FYI, in addition to the supercheap but flakey parallel iCSP, there is also a bit of code to turn a duino into an icsp programmer if you want to try a different bootloader: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/Programmer2

I'm running "arduino" in the arduino-0011 folder. It's basically a shell script:

Nothing special there. I compared it to the Windoz version, and it seems comparable. So, maybe there is a bug in the Linux variant. I'll have to try to find a different machine to use the IDE and see if it actually matters.

I found this link, http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/...num=1213583720, and http://forum.pololu.com/viewtopic.ph...w=unread#p4218, and it seems to indicate the complexity of checking free RAM.

It might also be related to the intermixing of C++ and C constructs on immature compiler/libraries. I only have anecdotal support, but I've seen it happen before - on Solaris no less!

Hmm, the malloc version returns 318, if I replace the memoryTest function with the following I get 381. I suspect the stack pointer version is not as future proof or accurate though. But it may still be useful enough. Your *10 malloc version also highlights the fact that the free memory may not be contiguous, since that returns only 170 bytes free when retrieved in 10 byte chunks.

Actually I did several ram optimizations and the malloc version did not register a change, but the above function showed 484 bytes free. And you are having issues with the malloc version, so lets go with the above function till it bites us :) I'll put it in the next version.

I tried it with a bare, unadorned board and got the same results. I'll plug in that function and see how it goes from there.

I don't have a non-Linux PC at home with a serial port to try. I'll have to rethink that one.

Parity check
 

FYI, I currently have set up two guinos on the same signal generator running to see if there is any consistency. I expect the injector open times will be slightly different due to frequency variations, but the injector and vss counts should be very close and so far they are, but will let it run for a few days. Also it is all rigged to run on the one 7805, hence the heat sink wedged behind it :) I will try and leave it alone for a day or so.
http://opengauge.org/diympggauge/parity1.JPG

That will be nice to know.

You may need to mechanically affix the heat sync to the 7805. Something like a small screw, alligator clamp, etc. should do the trick and help dissipate the heat.

If/when you get your scope, hopefully it's a 2+ channel. Then you could run up both and look at the signals. You should be able to see any variance or drift.

But, then again, maybe it doesn't matter... It's only used for bench testing.

Update:
@ 511 minutes:
trip MPG on green unit 64.80
trip MPG on blue unit 64.79
Distance on both 270.21
Injector and vss counts in synch
MPG variance %0.015 :thumbup:

7805 seems happy.

Update
green Time: 2734.30 minutes
blue Time: 2734.30 minutes

green cumulative mpg 64.82
blue cumulative mpg 64.82

green distance 1316.3 miles
blue distance 1316.3 miles

green fuel 20.31 gallons
blue fuel 20.31 gallons

:thumbup::thumbup::thumbup::thumbup: