Old 486 Board for ECU??

[Diehl, Jeffrey]

You are the man!  I was so green with envy that I couldn't see with all the
tears in my eyes!  Wow!  

I assume that you have pretty well stripped down the Linux OS for this
puppy.  What do you think your problems are WRT the fuel injection system?
That is, why do you think it won't run right?

I wouldn't think the 4 displays would be so tough.  Are you trying to do
graphic mode, or just text mode?  You might try to use a fifo to manage the
4 displays.  You create the fifo and have a program listen to it.  This
middleware program would then delegate display instructions received on the
fifo to the appropriate "real" display.  Then, you write all of your guage
programs to talk to the fifo with some vt100-like protocal.  Does this sound
easier than what you are trying to do?

This is sooo cool!

Talk to you later.

Mike Diehl,
MR-2, '87na

-----Original Message-----
From: Frederic Breitwieser [mailto:frederic at xephic.dynip.com]
Sent: May 01, 2000 11:03 AM
To: 'diy_efi at diy-efi.org'
Subject: RE: Old 486 Board for ECU??


>with hard drives and such, you should be able to regulate plenty of
>current to run the board.

For my needs, system board, cards, and drives, I am drawing:

Voltage     Power Up     Normal Use
+5V         4.10 A       3.25 A
+12V        2.00 A       1.19 A
-5V          .02 A        .02 A
-12V         .01 A        .01 A

While our configurations may or may not be difference, these are real
numbers that people can work on.  Building a negative inverter power supply
is not that difficult.  The current requirements are very small.

>Booting the machine once and simple suspending it from then on is a
>wonderfull idea!  But how many motherboards support this?  Most of the
>boards I have laying around are from desktop boxes...

All laptops support this.  And yes, a lot of motherboards do not.  The
Micronic's system boards in a lot of the medium level to high level late 486
and early pentium's found in "Gateway" computers, for example, do support
this feature.  "Green PC" :)  Its tough to find it, but ebay is often
selling old "junk" which for us, might be a goldmine.

>I love linux, but isn't that a bit of overkill?  
>Do you really need that much power?  I agree it 
>would be nice to have networking, mp3, and browser
>configuration capability in my auto-computer, 
>but...  On the other hand, it is stable.  There 
>are good development tools.  And software is easy to
>write...  You might be onto something here.  And 
>if you had wireless ethernet... <slap>

Well, you are getting ahead of even me.  The 486DX66 system I am using will
control the fuel injection, the timing, the suspension's spring rate, the
suspensions damper rate (rebound and not), the LCD video-based dashboard,
and of course, audio functions, and security.

It is absolute overkill.

But,

The Efi interface is 100%.  The software is still barely working.
     engine can start, idles poorly running too rich.  Rev pulls
     result in timing problems, still too much fuel, and a smelly
     backfire.
The suspension interface is 100%.  The software works, but has no
     intelligence associated with it.  Using the keyboard, I can
     control ride height and damper effectiveness no problem. Again,
     no input other than the keyboard operator.
The LCD video is killing me at the moment, and the current project.
     Four 5" diagonal color NTSC displays, driven off a PC.  I can
     easily get one to work as the entire display, just not all four
     as a combined display.  Not a topic for this list however.

>You might consider RealTime Linux or FreeDos.  

I will, thanks.  I/we have been using Redhat.  Since we have a built in
ethernet on the systemboard, I plug my laptop in with a crossover cable and
"telnet" for control, and "ftp" to update code changes.  yes, remote
connectivity is important, and I coincidentally have purchased a two UHF
transmitter/receiver pairs, so that one of the serial ports at 9600, can
send real-time date off the car to a monitoring station off-track.  While
data can be stored locally, and most of it will (purpose of the "D" drive),
having some of the data, or a subset "overview" transmit was important to us
- this way in a firey track accident where the drive is burned to death
dispite insulation, some data has already been offloaded so we can evaluate
exactly what happened.  Again, offtopic discussion, and I'd be happy to
discuss it off list out of respect for the rest of the EFI folks here :)

>I also recall seeing LCD displays for PC's with Linux drivers...

Serial LCD's :)  I am about a week away from "bailing" on the custom video
board and finding drivers for four cheapo matrox cards with an NTSC out and
just handling it that way.  I was hoping to keep the board count very low to
save electricity, eliminate bizarre "sleep mode" problems that some video
cards have, and of course, dollars.  $800 in video cards to do something
"close" to what I want, versus making on myself that will cost the same and
do "exactly" what I want is easily justified.  Though, I've invested enough
time in it resulting in an unreadable splotch on one lonely LCD display :)
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