No, I'm not joking at all. I have just tested the CPU core section of the ECU and I am starting on the Input sensor circuitry. I intend to put it in the car and just read air mass, ignition, throttle position, etc. to see that it can interrogate sensors OK, then it's going to be rigged to actually control the ignition, but not the carburetion. I don't know enough about fuelling strategies and even less about the fuel demands of this car, so injection management will be a while coming. I have, however, got a 4-coil ignition pack wired and tested, and I am getting a special injector fuel rail started based on Weber manifolds (the only ones small enough to go onto the Mini intake side).

When it all comes together (no hurry, I'm patient) I have no way of tuning the fuelling other than by tweaking tables of injector openings for different RPM; normally, this would be automated and done on a rolling road, but I have neither the money nor facilities to do this, so I am going to have to spend a long time doing it manually across all engine speeds and loads. The best way to do it is get the fuelling roughly right, then drive the car and record what the lambda sensor in the exhaust pipe says about the mixture. Recording means some sort of data dump, and the board has a number of I/O ports available. Instead of carrying a portable around to capture it and having to deal with batteries and all that rubbish, I thought that the empeg would be a good alternative. Hence, a small background daemon process that runs and just sniffs OBDII data, and dumps it to disk. There is the obvious problem of the disks being mounted read-only during normal operation which I have yet to deal with. Additionally, if I did want to use the empeg as a control/monitoring/tuning device, then I would have to have control of the display (for gauges, counters, so forth) something I haven't investigated too deeply. I have been tracking what people have been doing here on the board, and when the time comes, I'm sure there will be help available.

One other early experiment which is waiting for an I/O board is a set of accelerometers and suspension extension potentiometers which I want to use to look at how the car is cornering and tracking, etc. This was going to be via the A/D on Patrick's board. However, since I have a fair bit of extra capacity for unsupervised A/D on my ECU, I may just connect them up to the ECU and feed the data back through OBDII as well. Think about that - your empeg being able to display your acceleration in g, show a graph of your suspension movement (selectable by wheel of course) alongside your average fuel consumption....

Whatever floats your boat, dudes.

Really scared yet? You should be - it will be on Dutch roads sometime

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015