Results tagged “PIC” from The GPSy EV Project

When I was first starting out with the Piaggio conversion, I was monitoring my power consumption using a Doc Wattson / Watt's Up. Good for checking on amp-hours used, voltage, etc.

A few weeks into the conversion, I dropped my bike chain on the Doc Wattson and broke the LCD glass. Very annoying -- they should provide a lexan cover on things like this that will get banged around.

I asked the manufacturer if they did repairs and they didn't. I asked them for the spec on the LCD and they said it wasn't divulge-able. They did give me a discount on my second one and I threw the old one in my "crash" bin.

Well, fast forward a few months more and I've been working with STAMPS and PICs and know a bit more about LCD screens -- especially how most 16x2 displays are driven using the same HD44780 IC chip.

Time to open the Doc Wattson up and see what's in it.

More after the jump

As I mentioned in a comment, I've been playing with microcontrollers these days. I started out with a BASIC Stamp2 system which was great and very educational, but quickly ran into its limitations -- the main one being financial, each STAMP is around $40-50 which limits its applicability.

But the advantage of the STAMP is that it's very easy to program (in BASIC!) and that it has the ability to pulse PWM to control RC servos, which makes it ideal for EV projects.

On my explorations for a cheaper microcontroller, I came across the open source Arduino which was fantastic except that it was still expensive ($20 / chip for the cheapest) and the programming environment was more fidgety that I liked.

The solution appears to be PICAXE. The cheapest one is $3 / chip (wow!) and it can do full time PWM as well as has a A/D converter right in the chip. And its fully scalable as well. The BASIC programming language seems very similar to the STAMP and runs on Macs, Linux, and MS.

$3/chip for the 8M means that I'll be able to place them everywhere! Cheap is good!