Old 486 Board for ECU??

[Peter Gargano]

Axel Rietschin wrote:
> 
> ECUs are all about timing. Something PCs, no matter how fast, are not really
> good at.

Well put, Axel!

But, for the die-hard's, I've often thought that if you really want to "roll your 
own" EFI, then a good starting point would be a printer server box - like the
Intel Netport, NetExpress, etc. units. These are usually available at
throw away prices (printers have their own built-in networking these days), and
they're small, often have flash program memory, built-in serial (and parallel
ports), some have fast Z80's or 80188 processors, and, for really fast ALDL, you
can use the built-in Ethernet port! Most of the work would be involved in making
the digital and analogue I/O, and perhaps enhancing the CPU's timer functionality
somehow. Of course, by the time you've done that, you could have picked up a
junk yard GM ECM and reprogrammed it to do what you really wanted to do in the
first place ;-)

BTW, if you're going to use a PC with a BIOS, I'd have thought the first task would 
be to write your own BIOS that does what YOU want, not what IBM decide, 20 odd years
ago, were good POST routines.

Peter.
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