keep up the good work Dan, i take it your close to a working prototype?

WOW thats very cool stuff there Dan.
Had to do some electronics at college all i ever made was a display flash 0-9 :(

Cool. Not done much of the programming side.

This is a FS-OC first ..just remember we strive to give you the best ..and from myself and the rest of the FS-OC staff well done Dan..:You_Rock..

Bit of an update.

Ive got all the hardware rigged up ready to go. Ive sort of finalised a schematic but may have to change a few things round when I get round to the real coding (change IO pins round).

But so far the features are to be :-

• 2 LED's (Status and Power)
• 1 Button & Power switch
• 1 6 pin ICSP port (for the unit to be programmed thorugh)
• 1 2 pin serial port header (debug output& future use)
• 1 expansion port (future use - maybe an LCD or SD card for logging)

Thanks to my lovely missus the development kit has been ordered this afternoon so should have it tomorrow/monday.

With this adding things such as SD card support (so you can log whats going on to a text file or something) is easy, as is sending output to an LCD.

Once ive got it all working on the breadboard (see updated pic below) I will see about designing a PCB (never done it before) and move to SMD components possibly, so the size/cost can be reduced.

Theres not much else to mention at the moment. Ill update the thread with a schmatic early next week.

Basically, version 1 of the software will do the following.

1. check canbus status , if ok illuminate ready light
2. wait for buttonpress
3. on button press send reset instruction to dash cluster
4. switch off ready light and end
5. It will also spout out what its doing to the onboard serial port, so if you connect something to it you will see what is happening.

If you are interested here is a bit of light reading for you, gives you a basic introduction to the core components to be used.

• Wikipedia CAN-bus page
• Wikipedia HD44780 LCD Info
• Wikipedia PIC Microcontrollers
• Microchip MCP2551 CAN transciever Datasheet
  

Ill update next week when the software arrives.

Bye for now..
Dan

with alfa using the same can system, hopefully this will work with them if so, BONUS

good work dannyboy

Hi red,

It wont work with the alfa as is, as the reset codes are different.

But if the reset codes can be known, it would be literally a 2 second job to change the software to do an alfa/punto/whatever, so long as its done thru CAN.

Ill have a look at some of the examiner data I have at home and see if there is anything about the alfa dash clusters.

If not would probably need to log a car in an examiner session to get the code. Are you offering to be a guinea pig? :)