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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. "
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.
Why did you send this story here then?
They just want to make their pansy little box or car look faster.
Exactly. For clarity to those who don't know cars:
There's nothing like having some loser describing to you how quickly he can make his 1.6L Honda Civic go.
Imagine if you owned a Cray supercomputer and some child implied that his "tuned" 400MHz Celeron was in the same ballpark.
As the saying goes, there's no replacement for displacement. An engine is an air pump, the more air you suck through it per revolution, the more fuel you can mix with the air to achieve complete combustion. The more combustion, the bigger the explosion pushing the piston down, and the more power you get from the engine.
A 1.6L or whatever Honda is laughable in the face of a common Chevy 350 (5.7L) like you find in a Camaro or Caprice Classic, or in the face of a Ford 302 (5.0L) like in a Mustang, much less the Chrysler 440 (7.2L), Chevy 454 (7.4L) and King of Big-Blocks, the Chrysler 426 Hemi of the musclecar days.
Street racing is acceleration from a stoplight. That's called drag racing. There's a reason why those long and skinny drag racing cars with the huge fat tires (the cars are called "rail cars", the class of racing is Top Fuel drag) are rear-wheel-drive with big V8s, not front-wheel-drive with whiny little 4-cylinder engines.
Those racecars share more in common with my daily-driver 1976 Dodge pickup truck than does a typical ricer's car. My '76 Ram has a 400 (6.6L) V8 driving the rear wheels. With a curb weight of 4,000lb, it's about twice the weight of a Honda Civic. But 6.6L / 1.6L = 4.125 times more engine, and all other things being equal, 4.125 times the power. Into only twice the weight.
Needless to say, when an Integra with a big stereo pulls up beside me, I enjoy stomping on the gas pedal and showing him my taillights.
Modern EFI, overhead cams, combustion chamber design, etc., make incremental differences to improving the power, but a street car's engine is still built for gas mileage, durability and emissions, not for power, and the modern requirements for gas mileage and emissions choke the power potential of these modern improvements.
Those of us with real machines are quite content with our beige cases (in my case, a older, but still fast as all hell compaq proliant 8000 which was picked up dirt cheap from a dot com gone bust) and sleeper cars (also in my case, an Alpina).Indeed! My truck is forest green with rust and primer spots. Someday, I'll get around to painting it so that it looks nice again, but there won't be silly aftermarket rims or little blue lights on the windshield washer jets or clear tailights and big aluminum spoilers.
The car is either fast, or it isn't.
My truck gets 7 miles per gallon on the highway. The HC emissions are ~2 PPM, which is better than lots of 1986 cars, let alone 1976 trucks. I'm burning all that fuel. Where do you think it all goes?
Final thought. I tried Carroll Shelby's old trick. I taped a $20 bill to my dashboard, just in front of the passenger's seat. I had a disbeliever get in. I told him that, when the stoplight turned green, if he could grab that $20, it was his. He didn't get the $20.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.