I need advice .
It is about digitally controlled fuel gauge.
You have TF bicycle, digital fuel guage chip + Battery M chip monted on battery pack , both chips have serial ports to communicate with host DSP processor. Fuel guage is dead, you want to replace it. After replacing , would host processor be able to communicate with replaced chip without running some kind of sofware? Simple would host be able to handshake with new chip which didn`t communicate with it before?
Any electronic guru out there?
Miroslaw
I'm not sure about the specifics on a TF, but if the chips are programmed and you replace them, the new chips need the same programming. If all the software is intact, then they should talk properly.
To figure this out, I would look at the numbers on the suspect chips and find the datasheet for them. This should reveal whether or not they are programmable. Finding replacement chips would be a lot easier than finding software. It might be possible to copy the software from a working chip, but some might be copy protected. Again, the datasheet might give the answers.
if what you are talking about is programming your own replacement gauge to use the offboard IC's then the answer is probably that they have some form of softwaer handshaking or communication initialisation routine which must be observed before communications take place.
It is just possible that they just transmit serial data at regular intervals too. in which case you can make a very simple serial cable interface to check for that data on a pc or PDA, you would need to play around with the speed setting but it's probably quite low.
Maybe a good thing to do is to make a serial lead and monitor the comms on a working system and then write your own code to mimc it.
Either way it is too much of a long shot to be able to say for sure what you can and can't do at this point, without doing a bit more research
Chris