Funny Honda CBR600F1 Ignition pickoff

[Tim Drury]

>  The ignition pickoff on the Honda CBR600 has 9 teeth, then a gap of 
>about 120 degrees.  Anybody know why they did this?  I'm trying to use 
>the same pickup (splice the wire) to synchronize (hopefully in a seq. 
>port FI) the injection to the intake valve openings.  Any tips?

The missing tooth is used to determine absolute engine position.  We measured
what this is but I can't remember.  My ignition system is based on the CBR600
F1 engine; refer to http://spbted.gtri.gatech.edu/hpe/ddis.html.

>  Does anyone here know how the spark unit works?  Thanks!

The box has 2 large chips (probably ASICs) which control all the timing and logic.
Then it has a couple wimpy transistors for switching the coil current on and off.
We thought we could get much better spark energy by putting a couple high
current darlington-pairs in there instead.  We don't really know if we succeeded
because we didn't really know how to measure spark energy.  I do know that
one guy (pretty crazy) put a screwdriver in the spark plug boot and wanted to
see how far the spark would jump to the ignition block.  The stock Honda ignition
had to be held real close (less than an inch).  My ignition jumped about 8 inches
and knocked the guy back a couple feet.  Take this very scientific data however
you want.  Personally, I think the system was a little too strong; we would burn up
coils at an alarming rate.

-tim