Home Brew Electronic Boost Controllers Firmware
The Home-Brew Electronic Boost Controller HB-EBC is a fully functional "do it yourself" version of an electronic boost controller. The project is completely open source and can be constructed for less than $60. The first goal was to make the HB-EBC as functional as any average electroinc boost controller available to consumers. That meant the HB-EBC needed a display, a way of inputting parameters and a simple way of setting the desired boost. The second goal was to make the HB-EBC open source and as inexpensive as possible. An average electronic boost controller might cost $200 where the HB-EBC can be built for a third of that, about $60.I designed an embedded system with its own custom hardware and firmware. I wanted to be able to write and edit the controller code so the design could be as flexible as possible, so the HB-EBC is built around a microcontroller. I decided on the Atmel ATmega 32 with 16KB of programmable flash memory, 2KB SRAM, 1KB EEPROM, an 8-channel 10-bit A/D converter, and a JTAG interface for on-chip debugging. The device supports throughput of 16 MIPS at 16 MHz and operates between 4.5-5.5 volts. It also has an open-source library called AVRlib which contains all the necessary libraries to implement many of the HB-EBC features