Microcontroller for simple automotive application?

Hi !

I'm about to design a simple controller for autmotive area - measuring

4 temperatures, controlling 4 solenoids, nothing significant beside that actually. Computing power is not an issue here, application is simple. Device is going to be powered from car 12V installation, obviously. It's not going into high volume, it's to support my friend's car experiments. It's a bit similar to devices used together with car gas systems.

  1. I'd like to use Atmel AVR's for that, as this architecture I'm most familiar with. Unfrotunately I've heard some rumours about AVRs being more sensitive to interferences (is this the right word?), power quality etc. Some people recommend PICs as being more immune. Is there really a difference between these 2 families?

And yes, I understand the importance of proper design :)

  1. Regardles of the uC chosen, I'd like to use some good external supervisory (reset + watchdog) circuit. Can someone recommend some good one for this application (whatever you've used and found reliable)?

  1. I need 4 high-side switches to control my solenoids. For higher reliability I'd probably use one of integrated switches with overvoltage/temp protection. There are some with SPI control and status readback, which sounds attractive. I've seen such devices from ST,Atmel,Freescale, yet this kind of devices seem to be not so easy to get in small quantities. Could someone point me to other companies doing this kind of chips?

Best Regards, Przemyslaw

Reply to
czajnik
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I switched to MSP430 (texas instruments) for the kind of circuits you want to build and I have no regrets leaving the 8051 architecture.

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Reply to
Nico Coesel

Processor family is almost irrelevant. What is relevant is good grounding, good shielding, and spike suppression. Rumours about sensitivity are almost always generated by people who by accident create a marginally better design than the previous disaster.

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Adrian Jansen           adrianjansen at internode dot on dot net
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Reply to
Adrian Jansen

I believe this is one of the most hostile environments for electronics that you can imagine. Expect to have a fine collection of dead 'insects' when you are done.

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Reply to
Homer J Simpson

A good start is a filter in EVERY line, including ground.......

Reply to
martin.shoebridge

I think the processor line is a little 'thin' and may not be applicable to your case, at all, but I believe Analog Devices has a new family (if you can call it that, just yet) of processors designed for automotive applications and that can take and operate from something like 35-40V on their Vcc.

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"Powered directly from the car battery, the single-chip ADuC703x devices integrate up to three 16-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), an ARM7 microcontroller, a local interconnect network (LIN) transceiver, embedded flash memory, an on-chip PGA (programmable gain amplifier) for a wide range of current measurements, on-chip attenuation resistors for direct battery voltage measurement and external or on-chip temperature sensing..."

Just a thought.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

4 K or RAM and 96 K or flash for a battery monitor? Software bloat goes on...

Thomas

Reply to
Zak

Hehe. What's more interesting to me is that it runs straight off the battery posts of a car, according to my skim of that page and lack of deeper experience to know any better. Given some of the hash one can expect with starting, turning off, and so on, that sounds a bit too good to be true.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

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