C Spot Run (under DOS)

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Well I have temporarily shelved the Psion II while I go back to looking at the gutted laptops for a more colourful display. I'm working on Borland C++ under DOS (no sniggering at the back, this is serious) with a full (wait for it) 16 colours, but that's all I need. There are good reasons for this, the main one being simplicity. The laptops are all Pentium I or late 486 so they need simple software and it will be keypad controlled so no need for a complex GUI. All I need is something that will read my data stream from RS232 and display it with some storage and analysis.

And here we have the first attempt, RPM and throttle position (TPS) on screen. Okay I'm cheating a bit because the data is coming from the bench test rig, but it's a step forward.

I've also had this displayed on the 7 inch LCD screen via the VGA-to-Video box, but at 640 x 480 resolution it is hard to read. I think experimenting with the colour scheme might help, but using composite video is unfortunately always going to be fuzzy. The physical rig looks good though and I'm thinking of spraying the LCD case matt black and incorporating the keypad into it.

And then adding some KITT displays and speech synthesiser.

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