by Mike Garrard
At its heart is our 4 cylinder cost-effective port injection gasoline engine reference design. It has generated significant interest. In fact, the dozen boards I ordered were allocated before they were even built! The inquiries are so sufficient that I am considering pushing it forward into an open source design, with schematics, layout, and some code available as freeware and built up units available, at a fair price. Of course, I turned to the experts, Bowling and Grippo of MegaSquirt fame, to find out what to do. We are having some exciting discussions.
Here’s the video I mentioned earlier:
One feature B&G wanted to see was cost-effective calibration, so we brought in Phil, author of Tuner Studio to help marry the two together. The idea is to add a USB interface right onto the ECU board so it will connect directly to a calibration laptop. Fortuitously, I have exactly four pins spare. However, this means I have to make another PCB revision, which is where you petrolheads fit in. You see, I have a problem: I have to convince my boss to stump up the cash for, say, 100 PCBs, hundreds of chips, build, test, engineering resource to hang it all together into a nice package that you might then purchase off the web. I’ve told him there’s a community of nuts like me who will take (in my case) a 1971 Mini Cooper, engineer a pressurized fuel system, weld up a manifold, add efi, slap a turbo on-top and zoom around the countryside and rally meets telling everyone what a great job Freescale does with powertrain chips. But to be convinced, he needs to hear it from you. So if you agree, there’s a comment box below where you can add your support of this as a project and we can make this happen.
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