Help, Newbie alert !!!!

[whizzo944]

Hello All,
I'm new to this Free-EMS stuff and I'm a bit baffled with information overload, so some questions if I may?
Do all variants of Free-EMS use a common CPU board from Technological Arts?
What tuning software will talk to the firmware?
It looks to me like the Puma hardware is the most popular, is this correct?

Thanks in advance,
Dave.

[jharvey]

I'm new to this Free-EMS stuff and I'm a bit baffled with information overload, so some questions if I may?

Hello and welcome along.

Do all variants of Free-EMS use a common CPU board from Technological Arts?

They all use the same MCU, but not the TA card. The TA card allows you to buy Common Off The Shelf (COTS) parts, then you can breadboard your way to a device. DFH uses the TA card and attaches to a stack of IO board(s), but hasn't been built yet. Puma integrates the brain board, and IO board, such that it's all one unit, so no TA card required.

What tuning software will talk to the firmware?

It appears that megatunix (MTX) is the most common right now.

It looks to me like the Puma hardware is the most popular, is this correct?

I think it's about 50/50 right now. I think the next spin of Puma will be the most popular. The first spin had a limited QTY. You might want to check the links from http://freeems.org Find the wiki it should help give you the high level look at much of FreeEMS. Also You probably want to browse http://puma.freeems.org

Enjoy.

[whizzo944]

Thanks, jharvey

[Fred]

MTX has the best support right now for tuning. The others may be broken too.

With respect to popularity:

5 engines have run on FreeEMS

2 run on TA solutions
2 ran on my Puma
1 ran on both and now runs on my original TA

3 to Puma 3 to TA, but, importantly:

Right now, 2 are running (present tense) on TA and zero on Puma.

Medium term future popularity is likely to go to the simplest and most robust design that is well marketed. I'm going to take a crack at creating such a thing and marketing the design. Marketing is the key word here, and I have the network to achieve that.

Fred.