New to it all

[opticaltrigger]

Hi everyone,Im real new to all thiss so I hope knowbody minds ifm my questions seem a little basic at times.
Im using a PIC16F876 for my projects and ive been messing around with small circuits moving servos,flashing led's on and off and using simple buton comands;but my goal in all of this is to trigger four ignition coils for a car engine in response to high signals from two optical triggers mounted on the distributor where the rotor arm used to be.
In place of a rotor arm I now have a four segment wheel and a single segment wheel with the triggers working off of it.The distributor has a reluctor in it which pulses the ignition amplifiers to fire the coils,and my plan is for my trigger signals to switch on transistors to supply the amps and coils with 12.v. in response to allow the sparks to happen.
I just seem to have thiss mental block with it all and I was hoping that maybe some of you petrol heads out there may have some pointers that I could use to get me started on the right track or even some places to look at other PIC Basic code which will get my head in the right place.
Thanks so much for any help.

O.T.

[mackrackit]

What part do you want the PIC to do?
Sounds like a simple ignition, why use a MCU?

[opticaltrigger]

Hi Mackrackit,thanks for the reply.
I want to use the chip to trigger the coils sequentialy in the firing order so that I can run a coil per plug and I want to have a mind on being able to adjust the ignition timing aswell.
The thing is Mackrackit that I realy want to grasp this so I can start applying it to project vehicles.I can see somthing in it that realy exites me I just want somone to point me the rite way so that I can learn.I realy love this stuff and Im into race cars and Im desperate to put the two together.

[mackrackit]

Ok, that should be doable.
I think first you will need to get a handle on the rpm monitoring then go from there???
Here is a thread about that, it is old and if you have PBP 2.5 or newer then the LONGS option should help.
http://list.picbasic.com/forum/messages/4011/4360.html?1030588166

in the FAQ section there is a post "better search ..." I think that will be handy also.

I have not done anything quite like this but I think I would do PWM based on RPM , maybe. I will have to think more about this....

[opticaltrigger]

Thanks for the link to the old post Mackrackit.I felt alot better after knowing at least there are others out there that have grappled with this kind of application.It was encouraging to see somone on that post mention that it would be great use optical sensors,which I have.
By the way I just tried to stick a couple of pictures of the distributor and its sensors up but when I click the attachments button above I just get error on page.Any Ideas?
Thanks Again for your thoughts
O.T.

[mackrackit]

By the way I just tried to stick a couple of pictures of the distributor and its sensors up but when I click the attachments button above I just get error on page.Any Ideas?
To big? Wrong format? Windows? :)