Microcontroller for simple automotive application?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

"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

Thomas

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