FAMiLab

Mack brought in this “MegaView Display for MegaSquirt” device many weeks ago. I spent some quality time with it, and while we think the vacuum display may be broken, or the connectors oxidized, I believe I’ve successfully replicated the noteable behaviors of the MegaView display for MegaSquirt with my new fantastic and fun Freeduino.

The MegaSquirt is an automotive embedded computer system that does custom fuel injection, with cool custom displays like this – with vacuum displays! which I’d never seen before. The MegaView uses a MC68HC908GP32CP FreeScale microcontroller, and I will be using the ATMEGA328P-PU based Arduino.

The first step was to connect the MegaView display to the the usb->rs323 adapter shown above, and connect to it with minicom – set to /dev/ttyUSB0, 115200 8N1, and observe how it handles inputs, and outputs.

The results of all my testing showed that the MegaView succeeded at displaying V’s about every second, taking no input, and doing nothing else.

After several hours/minutes of whiteboarding and reading through test examples, I came up with this program to emulate all of the known behaviors of the MegaView Display for MegaSquirt

Now my Freeduino also produces V’s!

Freeduino V2.0 Serial
Assembly Guide
Arduino IDE Guide
Arduino IDE Download Page (I followed the Linux instructions on BackTrack 4, but had to apt-get gcc-avr and avrdude.)
MegaSquirt FAQ

If you’d like like to see my work, contact me or meet me at the Familab. I’ll help you make one for yourself

After a short Hangover-ish January 1st, the Makers and Hackers and Mooks wasted no time getting this year started off right! With plastic ‘poop’ jokes and superfluous LED blinkage!

Mack got his MakerBot printing! Apparently, as it’s last and final test, it prints out it’s own last part.

I got to make my first Arduino. You have no idea how much I’ve wanted those pins. I’ve tried everything else; parallel port hijacking, ripping apart keyboards, misusing joysticks… I have finally arrived.

A VPN to our doppleganger counterparts at FouLab in Quebec is hopefully coming soon. After all the fun of the 26c3 VPN, thought I’d set another one up .

Mack, Eddie, Rob, and David were here, laying down the Red Carpet for the MakerBot. More photos on the Flickr.

In all, great way to start 2010!

If there is a way to post to WordPress from my Android Phone, I will be updating this thing all the time.

We’ve spent a good 24 hours maybe at the lab this run. Indy’s cleaned the fcuk out of the place, Sean and I tried to get some wireless equipment working, cracked a demo WEP access point – which I’d like to turn into a regular challenge, and the media room PC broke.

Soon, we will be setting up a VPN with our Quebec dopplegangers: FouLab!