DFH - Defacto FreeEMS Hardware in KICAD

[Fred]

I'd say it's based on his NAW stuff, which he backs personally to within 0.1AFR (gasoline/petrol) and to be as fast as the rest. I'll be playing with the NAW soon, so can give you some feedback then :-)

[nitrousnrg]

Hi
I saw that the schematic isn't annotated, and there are no electric rules check, and no components associations.
I work with kicad, and netlist generation is a HUGE help to route the pcb. If I have the time I'll try to set it up, I opened the project 5' ago, so I need to read a lot before doing anything :-)
Using schematic+netlist+pcb makes my projects much more organized, and less error-prone :-)

jharvey, you are the hardware guy, right?
Just to know who can give me some pointers...

[jharvey]

Sure I'll give what ever pointers I can.

This schematic should be annotated, and it should have net lists and a draft PCB layout. The problem we ran into was that Fred hasn't told us that injector ? is attached to TA card pin ? If we had that we could finish the route, and make a first PCB.

Perhaps you looked into the templates folder. Those schematics are not annotated. What I was doing, was making changes to the template files, then I used a script to copy that one sub schematic to several schematics in the root project folder. After I had the nitty gritty done on the sub schematic, and those copied via script to the root folder and linked together with the top schematic, I then annotated and moved into PCB layout.

[nitrousnrg]

I think you did that so you don't have to make the same change in a .sch many times. I mean, you correct the injector driver sch once, and it is copied 6 times in the main schematic.

Well, I didn't know that, so I took the kicad project, removed all the errors/warnings -there were a lot of unconnected components-, and created the netlist. As you said, the only thing I didn't saw are the injector outputs. Anyway, I made the annotation to see the ERC report.
I'll push that change on my git repo later.

Fred... we are waiting for you ;-)

[AbeFM]

Speaking of - http://www.diyefi.org/forum/viewtopic.p ... 9930#p9930 - What are we using for injector drivers? I remember testing some stuff, and it getting warm. Meh.

Anyway, we should revisit this? Right now the board is high ohm only? No p&H, even in software?

[AbeFM]

I know it's been asked before, but Fred - a guess on injectors would be awesome! Then we can move forward.

Personally, I'd hedge. Do the jumper holes thing, with cut away traces. It's set up for the best guess, but, if you need to rewire it, you cut the traces with a razor and add jumpers in the holes to reroute stuff. Easy peasy and great for both development and real use.

[AbeFM]

I almost did it here - i.e. the one jumper in the front of the connector row (p5 I think, hard to read), it's defaulted "on" but can be cut off. Similarly on the connector, you can see where I shorted some things together. If the shorts were across the connector, you'd have a very compact set up for this. And if you're still paranoid about vias (which I think you shouldn't be, but it doesn't matter) it can all be on one layer, with just the holes going through.

Anyway, with that, let's just pick an injector channel. I mean, Fred, ASAP (we know you're busy) do whatever reading you have to do to make a guess, we won't hold you to it, and we can move forward. You can certainly expect more support from teams of people with cards almost ready to run their cards than a proto-card and some promises the code is coming nicely.

[Fred]

As of recently, I may end up moving all sorts of pins around. Sorry! Shit happens. I realised something the other night. And I need to look into it. I'm also thinking injectors might end up on bit banged pins, and ign on hardware timers. This could all change randomly. I can tell you though, we'll want port T and ports A and B jumperable configurably, to any of the outputs. we should also have a couple of other ISR pins jumperable to the inputs along with t0 and t1

if you want to make it flexible, like that, to the extreme, go right ahead, but i cant commit to a specific layout till we know more about the best way forward. yes we're getting close to useful, but we're not useful yet. the point at which we are is the exact SAME point that we know the pin out. at that point we can tidy up the rest of the design and start knocking out prototypes, no problem. until then, prototypes are useless anyway, so why bother?

Just calm down and lets keep developing it with the test hardware until we find the right solution.

One piece of the puzzle is that thread on random pin behaviour. Anyone with hardware can/should be helping figure that out.

Fred.

PS, its 4-fcuking-am in the morning... you're fcuking right i'm busy!!!

[jharvey]

I seem to recall that it produces one or two ERC issues basically complaines about some unimportant thing with the power pins. There shouldn't be significant issues.

Hmmm, what is the file name you have, and where did you get it? Did you get the sourceforge zip file?

[nitrousnrg]

Hmmm, what is the file name you have, and where did you get it? Did you get the sourceforge zip file?

I cloned from Fred's repo at github. It has 140 ERC errors, all of minor importance.

I'm also thinking injectors might end up on bit banged pins, and ign on hardware timers

I must agree on that. Ignition timing becomes critical at high RPMs, while I think fuel timing isn't as important. It is important how long you are injecting, but not so important *when* you start the injection -and the time scales are totally different-.
I'd use the hardware timers on ignition. usec errors at 12000rpm are quite noticeable in terms of ignition timng. If you want to achieve an error less than 0.1° on the ignition at 12000rpm, you can't have more than 1.3 usecs of error in the timing.

And, IMHO, I'd like to see P&H from the start. Here -Argentina- there are many all-motor, or turbo car that has low impedance injectors. I wouldn't like to have to use other EMS than FreeEMS only because of this.

I'll keep reading :-)