To meet our needs of having an ECU that would allow us to cut down on costs and have data logging capabilities, one of the members of our team over the past few years has designed a daughter board that does the needed signal conditioning for controlling the injector coils, fuel injectors, etc. This daughter board also has an SD card which will allow us to store logged data which can be analyzed after running the car. This can be seen in the figure below.
This board fits together with the Axiom PB-0555 board which uses the Freescale MPC555 processor. Essentially the Axiom board does all the processing and control while the daughter board does all of the conditioning and storage. The two boards can be seen together below.
From here these two boards fit together in a nice little case to keep the electronics protected and allow for easy mounting on the car.
Some of the additional things that we plan on doing before developing more of the control software is:- Getting the storage to the SD card working over the SPI interface
- Getting the serial receive interrupt based to remove the overhead of polling the serial interface
- Developing a "stimulator" in LabVIEW to allow us to test our ECU timing and control code without having to hook the ECU up to the engine and worry about damaging any components.
- Implementing the serial protocol to allow us to display the data off the ECU in graphical form and also allow for an easy method of tuning the engine using an application like MegaTunix.