In reply to tpwalsh:
Old is relative.... the WOT thing is way older than ms, I think by almost a couple of decades.
As for this project- why would this earn more penalty laps than someone who makes some elaborate looking beast? As long as the price is low enough, it's just hard work.
A good welder is worth a decent comptuer.
Time working on body parts the is the same time working on code.
seems like, at least.
In reply to tpwalsh:
MS-1 8bit 8Mhz MS-2 16bit 24Mhz ... ... rusEfi 32bit 168Mhz
these micro-controllers are a couple of generations apart. With more power you can do much more stuff much easier. What kind of stuff? I am not sure yet :) Maybe fuel map would depend on my position on the track? I will see once I am there. I am doing this for fun. I've checked MS1 and I've realized that as a software developer I cannot tolerate it.
Another thing - I believe that once I get the firmware part polished I can hack into my stock ECU and replace the main chip and the main chip only, the real cost of this "upgrade" would be $20 which would work great for my racing series book book, which would penalize me for a nice MS if I choose to go with a modern MS.
I agree with MS1 being annoying to program, I'm a SW dev too and after looking at changing MS1 I realized it was an elegant and efficient design created by EEs but not very adapable, even with the prototype board. Guess ill be looking at your design and SW....
In reply to Raze:
I am an obsessed on readability and maintainability SW dev, so hopefully I've got this covered :)
What do you anticipate your total cost being? You mention the chip is $12... what about everything else?
I like it. Good luck.
In reply to ProDarwin:
The board and the components should be under $150, the case and a connector could be another $50
As for this project- why would this earn more penalty laps than someone who makes some elaborate looking beast? As long as the price is low enough, it's just hard work.
Yep, but whatever steel you're welding isn't free. Neither are resistors, caps, ICs and PCBs. The code is free, sure, and it's the majority of the work, but when working with a $500 budget, every little bit counts.
I see he's thinking around $150 for the populated board, that's a full 30% of the "budget." I guess if he's got that sort of leeway in it, then more power to him.
Also, I'm not sure if this is for Chump or Lemons, but I don't think Jay would look too favorably on it. I don't think they were real happy with the Hong Norr guys running an MS1 (on a 1.1rev board that sold on the open market for way under $100)
I'm not trying to E36 M3 on your project, it's seriously awesome, just not understanding the reasoning and hoping it's not a futile attempt. Tim
In reply to tpwalsh:
BS inspection is Phil's domain and I am sure he would see buying a MS and designing rusEfi from scratch differently. Plus, you are missing the part where I can hack the stock ECU and this way I am not buying so many ICs and PCB :) Would it be more labor intense? Yes. Would I test everything with my own stuff? Yes.
One day you would need to upgrade to E46 or above, I hope that at this point MS would not be able to run your gauges but rusEfi would :)
If you can get it past BS, then I seriously applaud your effort. It's not an easy thing to do, especially when you're talking about the intersection of EE,ME and SE like this.
In reply to tpwalsh:
I am not sure I could have got where I am alone - I have two guys helping me with the EE. We still have to see if I would find some SE help, because it's quite a lot of stuff for one SE like me :)
I'd love to help, but I'm way too amateur of a SE to be of any help. (My day job is server/network monitoring, none of my "code" is over 20 lines long)
New edition: does not it look cleaner? Check the video - it runs!
http://youtu.be/HnJM9Edid8E
rusEfi would definitely support the fancy stuff like Bluetooth and USB, but in the field nothing would beat a hard-wired 20x4 character screen.
Baby Frankensteins - one goes to Canada another one goes to Slovakia
How mature would you say this is hardware-wise? High chance of further hardware revisions or not likely?
High chance of further hardware revisions at some later point.
On the other hand, hardware goes on hold for now: the current version is good enough. It is still just one test engine - the next three test engines would (if) be running of this hardware.
I hope it's appropriate to post this link here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/312898525/rusefi-gpl-automotive-engine-control-unit-ecu-firm
Cool! I'll share it in all my standard social media channels.
I would recommend making a reddit.com account and sharing on these 'Sub-forums.' You'll have to make a post for each, and sometimes the mods are anal and will delete your post, but it should stick on some and help with your visibility. You might check out the programming specific sub-reddits as well, they'll like the opensource nature, etc.
http://www.reddit.com/r/projectcar
http://www.reddit.com/r/CarModification
http://www.reddit.com/r/CarTalk
http://www.reddit.com/r/Cars
Here's the master list of car sub-reddits:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Autos/wiki/subreddits
In reply to accordionfolder: Thanks for the great idea, I know have some reddit karma!
The https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/312898525/rusefi-gpl-automotive-engine-control-unit-ecu-firm is not really going well, but a Canadian has started a 2nd engine on rusEfi! That's huge for us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neGVmxol0Gc
Has this link been passed to the ecomodder folks? Could possibly do some cool stuff with it... add engine shutoff @ stoplight to some cars, alternator charging on decel only, etc.
Has this link been passed to the ecomodder folks?
That's a good idea! Are there any major forums of this crowd?
Excellent work so far. Arduino isn't the easiest platform to code to, but it is at least well documented.
Interesting that you're comparing your ECU to an MS1 (8bit, 8Mhz, 32K, 512bytes RAM) and not the later MS2 (16bit, 24Mhz, 128K, 4K RAM) or MS3 (16bit dual core, 50Mhz, 1024K, 64K RAM) and without looking at the improved Extra firmware that is available for all of the above as it is much improved over the stock firmware by quite a bit. Luckily you don't need a fast or highly complex ECU to drive an effective EFI system, the engine simply does not respond that quickly due to the physics involved.
The tuning and support options are more well-established in the world. I would look at EFIAnalytics' TunerStudio and strike up a conversation with the developer as your potential users will desire to use this software or something similar to tune their vehicles. Not too mention, AutoSportsLabs and their work with ignition controllers based on MS-technology and their datalogging for race cars: http://www.autosportlabs.net/ which is not MS-based, but is really quite a good low-cost solution.
A little concerning that you didn't pick up on some of the software safety features in the MS code as well as many OEM EFI solutions that have been in place for decades. Perhaps a little more research is needed for your product to ensure that there are sufficient fail safes and safety features before it is used on an active race track. Motronic, FAST, Bosch and many others are also solutions worth researching as they are very highly regarded/used in the world and many of their features are fairly well known.
Sometimes reinventing the wheel is a lot of fun, but don't forget that the wheel isn't new and that one can still learn a lot from history.
Really looking forward to seeing this develop, the work accomplished so far has been quite impressive. Well done!
russian wrote:Has this link been passed to the ecomodder folks?That's a good idea! Are there any major forums of this crowd?
http://ecomodder.com/ is the big one. I bet there are a few others though.
In reply to turboswede:
Wait a second, why Arduino? This is not Arduino, this is stm32f4 - that's a 32bit 168MHz and FPU. I would love to see an Arduino like that, but unfortunately this is just not there.
And no, I am not comparing this to MS1 or any specific MS - rusEfi has nothing to do with MS or any other existing EMS, that's a totally independent project. And I would not call this a product yet - this is a hobby project and it would probably stay a hobby project for some time.
I cannot agree more regarding the quality and popularity of EFIAnalytics' TunerStudio - that's why we have TunerStudio for about six months now :)
As for safety features and overall maturity... We have to see how this goes. We've just started a second engine, that was a huge step. This is still very far from track use. We'll have to see - unless more developers join or the kickstarter takes off, it is still a lot of work for one imperfect human.
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