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Hack Your Ignition (Before Someone Else Does)
guanxi writes: "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article about hacking and specifically, the "hacker's nirvana on wheels", all the way from hot-rodding to reprogramming your digital ignition. Of course, I neither endorse nor recommend any of the procedures mentioned, any of which may be inherently dangerous to your life and your warranty. "
here is a sweet page about modding cars. It can turn you into a ricer real quick. Car mods are pretty popular these days in my town, from big fins to stickers, to large exhaust pipes, there's just no end to the mods.
Here's a car that's been pre-hacked and souped up for ultimate geek driving: the MegaCar! I mean, just look at this picture. LCDs everywhere, 150k/sec mobile connectivity...The flash site is annoying, but damn, that car is sweet....
This is really very common in the automotive tuning world already. Many companies have piggyback-style computers that intercept the signals entering and leaving the stock engine computer and modify them accordingly. Products like the A'PEXi S-AFC (among many many others) use relatively simple mathematical formulae (think...mx+b) or look-up tables to modify the signals that the engine computer sees from the sensors or the signals that the actuators see from the computer.
For the more advanced racer, there are entire standalong engine management systems that entirely the engine computer itself (think Haltech E6k and others).
The point here is that the signals used between sensors and microprocessors onboard a vehicle aren't difficult to decode. Most relate to measuring the resistance across a sensor or sending out a pulse to run a fuel injector at a given interval. Granted, the signals sent between the various computers are a bit more complex, but it's by no means impossible to decode. The only reason that 3rd-party aftermarket manufacturers are really the only people building these things is that there isn't a whole lot of return for the average home-mechanic. By the time Joe Six-Pack builds his engine management system, he's spent so much time that he could have enhanced the performance of his vehicle with all sorts of non-electronic devices that are cheaper and better understood in the automotive community.
Are there very cool things that can be done by the individual with a personally-designed engine (and transmission, and A/C, etc) management system? Sure! Loads of cool stuff!
Now how many people out there can spare the time, effort, and money to have a system that really only performs marginally better than anything that can be bought off the shelf? Not many people, that's for sure.
But luckily, that's what universities are for...which explains why I'm still in school.
It is inappropriate to link to the Jargon File's main corpus....It is several megabytes, and costs the site maintainer mucho bandwidth so you can browse one entry.
. html
Use this: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hack
Two points: ONE: most cars do NOT benefit from performance computers. TWO: most performance computers are added on to cars that are normally naturally aspirated and converted to turbo form. (a lot of cars that dont have turbos from the factory judge the amount of air with a vaccuum sensor instead of a mass air sensor) Often the relevant sensors dont even exist for the stock computer to talk to.
To make an example, the average honda civic computer settings are pretty much already maxxed out in stock form. You add an intake and an exhaust and youre still in the range that the stock computer can adjust for. You can actually add about half an atmosphere of boost (from turbo or supercharger) and still not need a custom computer. This applies to a most other non-turbo cars as well. Factory turbo cars have even higher limits.
Remember, modern cars have to be able to operate at 10,000 feet above and below sea level in a wide range of temperatures. Most cars have injectors that can take about 150% to 200% of stock duty before they begin to max out. Up to this point the car will still not even pollute!
Basically the only 2 ways to outpace the stock computer is to
1)bring in too little air at idle or have massively oversized injectors (the computer can't control the injectors to produce less than a certain minimum period of being open) which will cause "lopey idle" or stalling and rich emmissions.
2)bring in so much air at high rpm that the stock injectors can't let in enough fuel. Basically you will start to run "lean" (not enough fuel) which will produce very high temperatures and detonation (and kill your engine).
You basically only need a special computer if you are running massive cams (alternatively you could just raise the idle, which most people do) or if youre running such massive amounts of boost that the only solution is to run massive injectors (here again, you can actually just raise the idle). Now consider this: when youre making over double the stock hp, there is no way a factory computer is going to be able to cope anyway- I dont see the point of making them more hackable. On top of which, the only reason to use an expensive computer is to make the car more emissions friendly. And guess what mods are pretty much illegal under CARB rules? You guessed it! Programmable ECUs!!! The high-boost 323 and miata guys routinely run hacked ECUs with 12-15psi of boost, then turn down the boost and swap injectors for smog every two years. Its pretty sad that you have to break the law to pollute less.