Just some late night thoughts.
Fortuitously with a 28 to 1 chance I seem to have selected the right input pin on the Master Picaxe 28X1 chip for use with the master data bus which allows a background serial receive function
Being woolly brained I don't remember selecting this pin deliberately due to this function, but perhaps subconsiously I did thinking it might be useful in the future
Anyway once set in motion this receives data from the slaves without user or program intervention (program execution continues) and stores it in the scratchpad 128 byte ram. I think I should be able to use this to increase the overall Master program speed, as at the moment i'm using a simple for/next loop and standard serial receive command. This multitasking may prove very useful later.
As a test today I am also increasing the Slave and Master Serial speed to 2400 baud from the present 1200 baud. If the data proves reliable I may go the whole hog and push the boat out to 4800,
Woo I hear you cry, well we shall see
2400 baud is in the middle of the available speeds so seems a sensible setting, and it will ensure BMS in curent form meets my target of scanning 50 cells a second. It's just outside that at the moment
I might need to change R8 on the Master board to 4k7 (from 10k) more in line with TTL levels to ensure adequate pull down of the Master Bus
I had an earlier issue with that on the slave comms which amused one or two
Any other software functions people would like to see on the Master?
Thanks to those who have already replied to this. No promise I will include any of them
but you've probably got good ideas. I've got a few weeks left as well before install day
I'm looking at a better menu button system using one of the spare Master ADC inputs and a resistor matrix to allow half a dozen discrete buttons on one input. Two just isn't enough