A little progress made

Jun 23, 2006 6 Replies

I fully redid the timing operation of my microcontroller. Now it wakes up every 1/10 second and records a time tick, and based on that I keep track of time hours/minutes/seconds since start, and also of elapsed time. I use elapsed time for preflow/postflow and such.



(wen I say wakes up, I must clarify that it does not sleep, it keeps running the main loop, but it interrupts itself with a timer interrupt evey 0.1 sec)



As always, the source code is released under GPL and is here



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i

And you've got the watchdog reset in the main loop, not in an interrupt handler, right?

Cheers! Rich

Rich, what watchdog?

i

AAAIIIEEEEE!!!!

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When your uP hangs, it resets it, and in this case, hopefully, prevents a fire. ;-)

Good Luck! Rich

That's a great idea. I added some rudimentary watchdog protections. Will try it out tonight.

I must note though, that my whole program has just one main loop and no other loops (yet).

i

I was using my Lincoln 175 TIG and rapidly running out of Argon. This was a part of convoluted SS exhaust manifold that I am nearing the completion of. One moment I would be tacking thin bits being careful not to burn through and next moment I would be using some serious current. This made me think of you project and the following issue. My Lincoln has postflow of 15 sec which his hard wired. Very irritating when the main gage is reading zero and I was tempted to aim the arc at the Argon tank to squeeze out some more gas. You have a programmable controller. You know how much current is flowing and for how long it has been flowing. It would not take to much coding to come up with postflow based on those parameters. Another nicety would be to be able to adjust the flow based on current. Can your microcontroller incorporate a flow controller?

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs (among other things)

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void _-void-_ in the obvious place

Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

You hit the proverbial nail on the head. Yes, it can incorporate variable postflow and I will. It is not hard to figure out how to do postflow. (same exponential moving average of current)

I wanted to put it in my welder ASAP, now I realized that this haste is harmful. I want it to spend time on my bench, I want to wire PWM based outputs to control welder's voltage and current, I want to program variable postflow, pulsed TIG, etc etc. It is better if I spend one extra week programming on the bench, it is easier than standing in front of the welder with my laptop in my garage.

You can see my source code at

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it changes all the time. This is the CVS copy of my source code.

i

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