I might be inclined to use the pru for this and just setup the pru as
escentially a hardware counter.  There are likely ways to do so with timers
and interrupts and such but being more of a hardware guy than software I'm
inclined to use a more hardware approach and use the pru as a counter that
gets read every so often.  the software for that then is escentially a
driver that creates /dev/rpm.

Eric


On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Stacy Cottles <[email protected]> wrote:

> Thanks Eric for the suggestion. I'll have to figure out the inductive
> circuit to use. Do I have to use interrupts or is there something better
> for capturing the signal from the pickup?
>
>
> On Sunday, April 6, 2014 1:51:07 PM UTC-5, Eric wrote:
>
>> an inductive pickup around the sparkplug wire should get you a nice pulse
>> each time the spark plug fires but remember the phases of a 4 stroke engine
>> (intake - piston down intake valve open, compression - piston up valves
>> closed, power - piston down valves closed, exhaust - piston up exhaust
>> valve open).  The spark plug only fires every other revolution.  Once you
>> have the pulse from the inductive pickup it should be buffered to provide a
>> nice square wave pulse of uniform voltage such that it's easy for the
>> processor to use and not a potential hazard to the processor due to
>> spurious high voltages (cooking the buffer circuit while in development,
>> sorta ok.... cooking the processor, well not so much!)
>> .  from there it's just software and the incrementing of a counter with
>> each pulse.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 6:33 AM, Stacy Cottles <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> I am building a web-controlled lawn-mower. I would like to be able to
>>> read the RPM off the gas-engine. I would prefer to piggy-back off of the
>>> spark-plug if possible since it fires faster as the engine spins faster.
>>> Just started on this but would love suggestions. I have a Beaglebone Black
>>> running Angstrom and I am using NodeJS to control GPIOs.
>>>
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>>
>>

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