ZFuel

[superlen]

BTW - Enjoy the smoke from prototype #1! :devious:

I laugh.....Sadly, because many times that's true.

The connector you see is scavenged from an old ECU. The part numbers are still valid & get listed as a current orderable part, but only in extremely large quantities. To begin with I plan on just scavenging from the core ECU that's sent in. While I would prefer a newly manufactured connector, the existing connectors are robust & with a quick deox cleaning should perform just like they left the factory.

Sarah,

Yes, at some point there will be an Android and Iphone app. I won't write any of it until the base system is up and going though.

Lenny

[EuroDat]

Hi Lenny,

The title of this thread threw me a bit. Thought it was something about fuel, but I just spent the last hour reading all the posts and finding it very interesting. Looking forward to seeing it develop into a usable system. I would love to help with testing, but Im really out in the wilderness with my 280Z.

I will remain an eager follower.

Chas

[Captain Obvious]

I laugh.....Sadly, because many times that's true.

I know that we've both been there.

So are you going to populate the board yourself? I've done a fair share of surface mount assy by hand, but not everyone is comfortable with the geometry.

Or maybe... You could tell me that you're gonna toss it onto the pick-n-place at work during lunch break. Wouldn't that be sweet!

[Captain Obvious]

Lenny, I sent you an email a couple days ago. You probably didn't see it because you're too busy soldering?

[superlen]

Cap,

I'll populate it myself....well when I say myself, I'll have one of my SMT employees do it for me. For just the one board, it will be placed by hand, but otherwise goes through the same process as production boards. It's screen printed with solder past, part's placed, then ran through the reflow oven. This is much faster than hand soldering every component (however, not as fast as the 13,000 part/hr pick&place) & as a bonus you get a nicely soldered board with a process controlled temperature curve.

At least it will look good to start with . After I get through debugging/modifying/destructive testing it'll look like hell. Oh, and check your email.

- General Update for anyone interested.

- I had purchasing order all the parts that I didn't already have in inventory & I'm hoping to get a prototype built next week by Thanksgiving.

Lenny

[FastWoman]

^^^ When asked on Thanksgiving what I'm thankful for, I'll be able to say Lenny is burning the midnight oil to give my Z digital fuel injection!

[rcb280z]

God I can't wait!!! Going digital was just a dream to me until Lenny came along Very exciting!

[superlen]

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Z Heads.

....oh and another update for those playing along at home.

The HellFire digital ECU Board is populated & powered up!! (No smoke yet Captain, but it's still early! - and to be honest there was a bit of a close call on a tantalum cap loaded backwards on the 3.3V supply input on first power up. ) I was running off current a limited power supply for initial power up as a precaution so there wasn't enough "ooomph" to smoke it. Had I connected directly to a full 12V battery.....well it would have been a little exciting when the power came on. Virgin power up.. Pop! & parts fly off the board. That's not how to start a project. :laugh: Thankfully, that didn't happen.

Once I swapped out the cap for a new one (& not soldered on backwards), the board came right up. The laptop detected the onboard USB interface, installed drivers appropriately & the JTAG programmer connected & allowed me to download code. Woot! Woot! I now have a development platform!! :classic:

Here's a populated pic:

And here is a picture of the target car & the test harness/bench.

Hmmm. Picture looks like it cuts off top half. Try here: ImageShack - test harness.jpg

I have limited time over the holiday but hope to have serial communications up and going between the HellFire and the Windows GUI & begin testing all the analog inputs.

Len

[Captain Obvious]

I love the smell of tantalum in the morning.

Excellent. That's a huge first step! Glad you didn't get any gravy inside.

PS - Big three phase thickness planer?

[FastWoman]

Very, very exciting, Len! That's a nice looking board!

There's not much I can contribute at this point, except my enthusiasm and my willingness to offer up my Z as one of your guinea pigs.

Perhaps also I can give you a chuckle: One of my whimsical pipe dreams is to build a vacuum-tube-based EFI for a vacuum-tube era car. It would be a period-correct "what if they had done this" sort of project. I would of course find some way to showcase the glowing array of tube circuitry in a plexiglass housing, almost certainly with magic eyes to indicate things like mass airflow!

But seriously, if you hadn't come along with your digital ZFuel board, I might have eventually designed/built an analog system using socketed, standard, off-the-shelf op amps. Weird, yes... but no weirder than the L-Jet systems we already have.

[superlen]

Captain,

Love the tantalum line...it was beginning to stink. And yes..the planer is a 1920's Porter 24" thickness planer. 5hp 3ph on the cutterhead. I just finished restoring it & have been using to plane a bunch of quartersawn white oak for trim in the house. I should have been doing that today as the weather was nice, but some deer hunting and Hellfire bringup took precedence.

Sarah,

I love the vaccum tube idea. That would be quite cool. One thing I just realized on the LJETS is that some of the later models actually have dip part ICs in them instead of the old style can ICs. I didn't run the numbers, but I'm sure they are opamps or maybe some comparators for the multistable vibrator circuit. I have too much on my plate now, but I would still like to reverse engineer the analog details of an l-jet.

Hellfire Update:

1. Status leds are blinking.

2. Communication is tested & I'm reading to/from unit via the USB. The classic "Hello World" or in this case, "Hello Z World", came across the link first pass.

3. Beginning on testing the rest of the basic I/O functionality and integrating my existing communications framework for the GUI.

Lenny

[FastWoman]

Hey Lenny,

I didn't know there were ECUs with DIP ICs in them! Where there's a DIP IC, there's hope. The nice thing about linear ICs is that there are not really that many different pinout configurations, and they are quite substitutable. If I were a purist, I would probably want a reverse-engineered reproduction DIP ECU board with all of the OEM equipment intact. However, I'm not a purist, so I think I greatly prefer your Hellfire board, especially considering the availability of essential fuel-conserving technologies such as lambda feedback.

Very exciting, Lenny!