And now, a lot more work…

We have reached the beginning of the prototype phase.

At this point, the car starts, runs, idles, and basic control functionality works. Throttle control, idle, fuel injection, ignition, fuel pump control are all being handled by the Motec. We have the base positioning data for the camshafts, but are not controlling them at this time.

The process consisted of verifying the pinout of the harness to all of the sensors, fuel injectors, and ignition coils first, with the power off. Then we verified power was correct before plugging in the Motec. We then captured the patterns for the crank and camshafts. We then got the car to start, after ensuring our data for the engine run switch was correct. The next step in this process is to verify where Top Dead Center is, and measure the offset from that and the crank position sensor. We then did that, and got the car to idle. We noticed the stock ECU and the Motec fighting as to what the correct idle settings were, so we took over throttle control at that point, and the car idles where ever we want it to now.

Without the work of Sander Marques at Obsidian Motorsport Group we would not have gotten as far as we had in as much time as we did. We still need correct characterization data for some sensors and the fuel injectors. The next piece fro myself is to write firmware which takes in the CAN data from the stock ECU, manipulates what is necessary to control the instrument cluster, and put that back on the bus. I will be working on this more in the next few weeks.