Thursday, July 21, 2011

It's alive!

I found out about a local road rally recently (not a frequent occurence), so I now have some real motivation to get the Odometer working. Got a replacement button in the mail (one of the originals didn't work), and we're up and running again!

There should be a clock in the upper-left hand corner, but I disabled it while I was rewiring everything.
The 'organized' wiring, after a complete rewire

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Slowly but surely...

Kind of ran out of motivation for a bit, but don't fear, the project is still going on!

Just to tease:
Straight lines are over-rated...

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Saving Configuration Items

One important goal of my odometer was the following: Maintain user configuration between power cycles.

We potentially need to track many different configuration items - some are functional, like the 'factor', the number of ticks per mile/kilometer.  Others are purely user preference - how quickly text should blink.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

What hardware to use?

Building an odometer, there's one overriding requirement: measure how fast the car is moving and/or how far it has moved.  For my use, I'm going to take a fairly universal approach: build a wheel sensor that signals rotations - most modern cars have a speed sender signal that can be tapped, but that's much more invasive than a simple wheel sensor. 

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Odometer Goals

In case you missed the backstory, here's the short version:
I'm building a high-precision odometer (aka "rally computer") as my first Arduino project.

So, aside from refreshing my embedded skills, and learning a fair amount about the Arduino environment, what should this project do?

The Department of Backstory

Some days, writing code is fun.  Other days, not so much.  For me, the realization that all the code I had written in more than three years did nothing more than change pixels on a screen or twiddle bits on a hard drive meant it was time to start something new.