john@invisiblegold.com - (860) 285-0172
GPSThis is a personal project to combine two of my interests: cars, and computers. I heard of a physics teacher that took a GPS and laptop to a Porsche track event, and was able to calculate g-forces on his car, along with track position, braking zones, etc.I started out researching embedded hardware and eventually built a prototype that used a GPS board to communicate with a DOS program over RS-232. It would report speed, heading, g-forces, etc and provided color coded mapping. My next step was to replace the laptop with a pc104 x86 board that ran DOS with a 320x240 LCD screen. To reduce the cost, I switched to a 8051 based board and changed the design to output to a 20x4 character lcd. My goal was to make a pocket sized device that I could carry while running. This project has involved alot of low level programming. For the DOS project I wrote everything from scratch in C at a very low level. I wrote my own graphics routines, serial drivers, a bitmap file parser, etc. For the 8051 project everything is written in assembler. I wrote an LCD driver, an I2C driver, an RS-232 driver, etc. |
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