Do I put the control next to the pumps and free up the controller to just send messages or do I keep them dumb and use the controller to do everything ?
The programmer in me wants to put an AT-TINY13 at every pump and let them do the delivery. OTOH guy says put everything in the middle because there's so much spare CPU power.
An AT-Tiny is about £1. It is attractive to me to make intelligent pumps. But it means programming the AVR and whatever I use as the controller and get them to talk to each other. But this also means that the controller can be less powerful and all it needs to do is talk whatever protocol I devise. A rich protocol, which could even be 9p, seems to solve engineering problems. By standardising with this idea I can expand the range of devices in the family as I go along. I will only have to implement the protocol on the central controller once and not care about that is attached to it.
I'm looking for excuses to make smart pumps. The action at the pump end will be the same whatever controller is used, whether it is the central one or not is irrelevant. If I start with AVR assembler to control the pumps I can always use an AVR CPU to do it and they are not rare.
There we go, that is what I shall do.
No comments:
Post a Comment