engine and drivetrain Programmable Electronic Ignition

[cowlum]

I have been having issues with a rough idle recently. To tackle the situation I have ordered new engine mounts and am about to refurbish the ignition system.

I was thinking of installing a fully electric ignition. Initially I was going to look round the salvage yards for older factory units from wrecked cars. then my brother pointed out this DIY kit from jaycar (do you have Jaycar in the US, im sure you have similar).

http://www.2cvstuff.com/popups_folder/electrical_folder/KKC5202.html

Its relatively cheap and allows for a decent amount of tinkering.

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# Minimum RPM: Revs at which the advance curve begins. The unit is at full retard before this point.

# Mid RPM: Allows for a 'kink' in the advance curve

# Mid advance: Advance at the kink point

# Max RPM: Sets the rev limit. Above this point the unit will only fire alternate times.

# Max advance: Advance at maximum revs

# Dwell: The default for the unit is 1ms. This setting allows the manufacturers timing to be entered. If the engine revs do not allow the full dwell, it will be reduced to the minimum of 1ms.

# Vacuum advance: The degrees of advance to be given when the vacuum unit is triggered. This can be wired the other way to give a 'retard on demand', which can be useful as a form of traction control. With a bit more circuitry, it could also be connected to a knock sensor.

# Number of cylinders

# Security number: A security code to lock the timing module against being changed.

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I can replace the points with Hall effect sensor

http://www.jaycar.co.nz/productView.asp?ID=ZD1900&CATID=&keywords=hall&SPECIAL=&form=KEYWORD&ProdCodeOnly=&Keyword1=&Keyword2=&pageNumber=&priceMin=&priceMax=&SUBCATID=

and simply insert a transitor style thingy found on most modern cars into the mix to cut the power to the coil when needed.

I think this is the route I will take. Before investing I thought I would ask around and see what other people have done for electric ignition.

or can anyone see a flaws in my plan?

another link

http://www.gadgets.co.nz/mjv/fiat/ignition.html

[Dave3x72tii]

Tim in Mn has built a system for coil on plug with salvage parts, he is presenting some of his innovations atr Gateway tech next month, if you look at the official Gateway website (link at bmwcca site) there should be a link to Tim Skwiots webpage describing it.

[TimMN]

That kit still leaves several shortcomings in your ignition.

1. replacing the points with a hall trigger still leaves the distributor and all its slop in the system. If you have a good, solid, tight distributor, your idle will also be helped by crane/pertronix style upgrades, especially with higher energy coils and wider plug gaps.

2. you will have a tough time programming your new advance curve unless you can mechanically lock out the distributor's mechanical/vacuum advance mechanism.

3. the advance 'curve' that kit lets you program is not a full, 3 dimensional igntion map that can be needed to really get your engine to idle well and have good off idle and low load performance. It is more of an electronically recurveable distributor.

I too had a rough idle on my motor. Crane XR3000/PS60 helped, but what really helped was going to a crank triggered, fully mappable/programmable igniton.

More details are on my website, link below.

[Zenon]

What Tim said. ;-)

But, for the price and apparent ease of setup that kits seems like not a bad value.

Before I had the full EFI setup on my car, I drove with just the crank trigger wheel, sensor, and ignition stuff hooked up for a month or so to verify that it was robust. The Megasquirt controlled a standard Bosch ignition module (like you see on late 70s and 80s VWs and E21 era BMWs) to fire the coil and the spark was directed by the distributor since I had no cam reference signal. All it took to make that setup work was the crank wheel and sensor (the toughest part), one wire from the Megasquirt to the ignition module trigger input, power and ground to MS, and a vacuum hose from the manifold to the Megasquirt. The improvement was immediately apparent and the tuning flexibility was emancipating. The "soft" rev limiter (works by greatly retarding ignition timing instead of cutting spark altogether) was also pretty slick.

It does not matter to the MS if you make any use the fuel injection features and Megasquirt is so cheap (if you build it yourself, at least) that it makes sense compared to any remotely equivalent commercial ignition-only system. The only downside is that it so flexible and open-ended, you will have a fair bit of work to do researching and deciding on a configuration for your car.

With the present MS 1 v3 board running MSnS-Extra firmware, you can have almost any type of crank and cam trigger wheels and distributor-directed, wasted spark (using Ford EDIS parts or directly controlled), or true sequential coil-per-plug ignition (my next planned "upgrade").

If you do go the MS route, then you will already have the hardware and be pretty familiar for when you do throw on some EFI intake parts...

regards,

Zenon