Alt4 - Range Rover EAS Diagnostic System / News: Recent posts

The Alt4 Project has moved to http://www.swiftcomm.co.uk/alt4

Please update your bookmarks, as this Sourceforge project will no longer be maintained.

After some serious development time with the Basic ATOM & MBasic I think it's time to move on to a purely PIC-based environment. At present this looks like it's going to be a 16F876-20, as used by the ATOM, along with the Proton Development Suite IDE. Don't get me wrong, the ATOM has been a great development tool but MBasic has become just too restrictive, especially in terms of code-optimisation & the lack of string-handling functions. The peripheral functions of the ATOM, such as in-built MAX232 are trivial to replicate, obviously the PIC will need a bootloader but that shouldn't be a problem. One of the main advantages will be cost - the ATOM is just too expensive to be used for production hardware, at circa 10x the price of the bare PIC.... read more

you may have noticed the new screenshots. These show the splash screen displayed at power-on, plus a selection of screens from the EAS | Clear faults menu.

Note the display is generated purely from the ATOM, which is also connected to a prototype 5-key input device for navigating through the menu structure.

The new direction for Alt4

I have decided to switch the direction in which I wish to take alt4. I originally planned to do all the development in C & use the PC serial port alone to communicate with the VCSI. However, after much research I have decided to move to a semi-embedded solution using one of these:

http://www.basicmicro.com/Product.aspx?productID=72&CategoryID=1

There are several reasons behind this change:... read more

The new Alt4 system, based on a Basic ATOM MCU is currently in development - screenshots available soon !!!

Documents and apps for developers have been uploaded to the project website:

http://alt4.sourceforge.net/pub/