thebigmacd wrote:I'd personally like to see the main ATC fuse(s) for the ECU onboard (in the edge of the case), like alarm and ICE systems have. It makes for nice packaging.
The trouble is that when you have a car amp with a pair of 25A fuses hanging out of it and then you run 5 metres of cable to the battery, you had better be sure you fuse it at the battery too otherwise you are probably going to end up with something like this one day :
What I'm getting at is that although we could fuse the 3 power inputs at the device, an intelligent install would also fuse the wires at the source. At which point the on device fuses serve no purpose really. Regardless of that, I wouldn't necessarily be against it, I just don't 100% see the point.
I would also like to see separate pigtails/connectors for internal and external curcuits. IE one bundle of wires goes to the firewall and one bundle goes towards the steering column. In the end it's a simple matter of implementation on a per-install basis but I think it would be good to group the PCB pads with such an end-goal in mind:
Like I say, just a suggestion on simple groupings. I find EMSs of all types both OEM and aftermarket tend to have the pins all intermixed.
This makes sense, however there could potentially be a trade off with how nice the layout on the board is. If that was the case (and it may not be) I'd keep the board sweet and allow the user to bundle the wires as they wish.
Additionally, some of the wires you have listed as "inside" I would DEFINITELY not be running inside. I'd be sending them straight to the battery or other power distribution point such as starter motor or BMW bus bar. I've not seen a vehicle yet with a properly separated power system inside the cab. Most/all share the smallish trunk wire with fans and lights and all sorts. Notoriously noisy really. Grounding is the same, if you want a demo, ground your head deck to the inner dash chassis and see what happens :-)
I think such grouping is definitely worth considering though. I might be more tempted to group clean stuff together and noisy stuff together and just pluck inside/outside stuff out of the loom as it made sense to do so.
Fred.