Real progress today…The second round of boards was received in the mail. I quickly ran down to the basement and mounted all of the tiny SMD components. The first impressions are excellent. The USB device appears in Windows correctly. All of the initial testing is going well. The next level of testing, will be to make sure that the physical protocol layers on the devices different channels are all working properly with the Rovers. This is a major milestone in the project!!!
I am on a 2 week vacation coming up, so you will not hear back from me for awhile.
Update: I have completed the testing of all of the lower level physical layer protocols. Everything is perfect and working properly. The EAS line protocol is working great and I can get responses from the EAS ECU. The ISO9141-2 line protocol is functions perfectly and I can also get a response back into the software. The last minute addition of the seperate slow initialization K and L line hardware also works as designed. All of the LED signaling works as designed as well. Although I am a bit concerned about the power consumption of the LEDs. I need to investigate that further. The USB bridge chip gets a bit warm, I think I chose the wrong LEDs. They may be a bit inefficient. Overall, this is wonderful news. I only have a few minor changes to the board and then the hardware is done.
