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I have a question about tenting vias with solder mask. There is a chip on my board that has a ground pad on the bottom. It's used for grounding and also as a heat sink, so there are thermal vias in that pad. The vias should be tented with solder mask to prevent the solder from flowing down the vias ...

Hi KB1GTT thanks for the pointers. I saw the USBDM things before but rejected them for some reason. I think it just was not clear if they would work. There are also cables about the same price that have a pigtail at the end and can do JTAG, that seemed interesting. Mostly I am a Unix/Linux guy so I'...

Rhinoman thanks for the pointer to the Ford EMC spec. I read it yesterday. Also for reminding me that the flex terminal caps are for thermal cycles. I think I knew that but somewhere it got buried. I will probably use them even for the 0603 caps, but I'll make a final choice in the next day or two w...

I think I've read the Maxim note, but will go and double check it. Here's a description of what I did with copper zones/planes on this board. It is a 4 layer board. One internal layer is completely a ground plane. The other internal layer is divided into a couple of areas and also contains 2 short t...

I will order caps for my board soon. Does anyone have opinions whether for track cars with motors mounted directly to the frame it would be advisable to use "board flex sensitive" capacitors. I think they have terminals with an epoxy layer in them to make them resist vibration better. They...

I noticed in one of the papers for the ion sensing stuff that they were using a very highclamp voltage on their coil, 1000 volts. Maybe this is because they are using a lower inductance just to try and get less low pass filtering of the signal. Trying to read a high frequency signal on the other sid...

Thanks for the good advice here Rhinoman. It's interesting that grounding is a simple concept and yet one of the most difficult and important ones too. I have watched hardware guys struggle with this for decades and the stuff they worry about on the high speed boards is amazing to me.... I have been...

multi-core development would be pretty sweet, I am really excited about your whole effort! Thanks for the enthusiasm. I am trying to be forward looking at and the same time realistic and make choices that will get me to the end of the project. It's the same type of thing you are doing with developi...

OK. I didn't know the code names for the chips and that is what came up with a simple Google search. The embedded board seemed like a slightly odd choice, but then who knows sometimes... Thanks. Perhaps I should have chosen one of the larger chips. I'm kind of old fashioned and prefer simplicity to ...

I'll be watching this with interest, I have designed OEM ECUs using both the Andorra and Mamba, however my software experience is very limited.

Thanks, Rhinoman. So an Andorra is a 5642 and a Mamba is an Intel embedded board?

Can I ask, what do you do for the day job, what is your basic background, etc. I'm a systems software guy, often I work close to the hardware. I have often worked closely with hardware engineers and have experience doing board bring up etc. My first job in the late 70's I worked for a company that ...

I had no idea there were other sources for the CPU chip. Is ST also second sourcing the support chips? I started the design with supporting CAN for the main interface but then it seemed the cost of converters from USB to CAN for the laptops seemed too high. I liked the CAN because I wanted to be abl...

Hi KB1GTT. Hmmm, can I jus call you KB1? You're probably just up the road from me, unless your north of the Bangor ferry. Yea, I found myself wondering last week why I didn't just make an add-on for the $99 board. Long run, I think this will work better, but I hope it doesn't add too much pain. Inte...

Left quite a few details out, I had to run out the door. I consider everything open to discussion because I would like to get this right. In real life I'm mostly a software person and it has always made sense to m to get early versions of your stuff together and running as soon as possible so you ca...

Here's a picture of my ECU card. I just received them in today from Advanced Circuits. Now to flesh out my BOM, order the parts and ship everything back to get assembled. Andrey has noticed this project and been helpful with suggestion including an invite to post here. I'm just getting around to thi...