HR Geeks

For a while I’ve been talking about using a really neat standalone injection system on one of my cars. The system I’ve been looking at for a good while is called MegaSquirt developed by Bowling and Grippo. The hardware is built around a Motorola MC9S12C64 microcontroller on a custom PCB. If you are inclined, you can even just buy the PCB and buy all the parts from mouser to build it yourself or for the rest of us there are a few places online that will sell you a completed kit ready to go. Some of the early code was written in assembly, but the more modern programs are all written in c.

For those not familiar, in a gasoline engine the ratio of air to fuel that gets burned in the engine is critical for both engine health and performance. Too little fuel and you can risk damaging the engine, too much fuel and you lose power and waste fuel. The fuel injection system is responsible for determining the amount of air entering the system and providing the appropriate amount of fuel for proper combustion. In many cases the same system is also responsible for correctly timing the spark that ignites the air and fuel mixture.

MegaSquirt is ideal for people looking to shed their old carburetors or mechanical fuel injections systems and update to modern electronic fuel injection (assuming they have the expertise and free time). It’s also an excellent choice for DIY tuners if you want to spend the time (and dyno runs) to squeeze every last horsey out of a motor.  Similar commercially built systems are available but most of them cost several thousands of dollars, whereas a fully assembled MegaSquirt unit can be had for around $300.

I’m going to be undertaking this project on my 1983 Volvo 240 Turbo (If Telmnstr will let me maybe I’ll try to get it on 757labs) but I’m looking to maybe get some of the car and computer nerds together on this one as there are a lot of things that have to be right before the car will even start. Things like calibrating all of the sensors, building a wiring harness, some machine work for various trigger wheels, programming maps and tables into the computer etc.  If anyone wants to get involved shoot me an e-mail.