) I'll be moving on to a more extreme street-ported 13B and Whipple supercharger I have waiting. Finally, if finances allow and I can convince my brother-in-law to sell me his 20G three-rotor then I'll probably have something to satisfy my need for speed for the time being.I bought the RX-7 new and it now needs a fairly comprehensive restoration. I hope to be finished when the car turns 30 years old this fall. Strangely enough I don't seem to be able to find parts for it as easily as I used to
. This project will be in parallel with the restoration so it may move in fits and starts.About me: I began crewing for road-race teams about 1980 and kind of tapered that off ten years ago. Professionally, I was an electronics research technician working at a large university. My nick, caletron is shortened from Caletronics and dates from the mid 80s and there's a story to that.
Around about 1984 I was convinced by copious amounts of alcohol to build an EFI system for a local racer. Andy had been struggling with a turbocharged Hilborn injected 1.6l Mitsubishi. Mix trying to get the right "pill" with 25-30psi boost levels and it was a bit too easy to kill engines along with very expensive forged pistons, rods, etc. What with keeping the rest of the race program going (for instance dry-sump oiling and ground effects at the amateur level was new at the time and so on) he wanted some help.
Since I had been fooling around with the 8MHz 16-bit MC68000 and I had access to an assembler for it (on a roll-around mini-computer!) I had little choice of which CPU to use (at the time the OEM systems were all eight bit and they were struggling to get a good product within that limitation; I wanted to free myself from that at least). A C-compiler (sheer luxury!) was only available to me a few years later. Anyway, a year goes by with things like, for instance, changing to the Vega 2.0l sleeved aluminum block (re-do the optical sensor on the camshaft), trips to Seattle to calibrate a hot-wire anemometer MAF sensor, PCB design tools were mylar, tape, templates and a knife. Updating firmware (I'm not sure that word existed then) was via UV EPROMs.
Remember, no laptop, no feedback except what it sounds like in the shop, at the pits, and driver reports. But we had a very successful project. While it held together. After a couple of seasons and turning up the boost race by race we noticed at the end of one session an oil leak, hmmm, from a crack in the block. Strange, well another block was prepared, fairly promptly blown up and then we knew we had hit the limit. The pressures involved were tearing the cylinder portion of the block from the crankcase
. We contemplated putting a girdle from valve cover to oil pan but decided done was done.So, back to Caletronics. I had been driving a '71 Nova and then a '68 Buick Wildcat and was different from my friends in that I drove "American Iron", as opposed to Japanese. That and some stunt driving earned me "Cale" as in NASCAR driver Cale Yarborough. After I started applying electronics to automotive it mutated to Caletronics for my, very small-time, business efforts. Fast forward through things like building a house (only family and friends' hands; no contractors except for gas lines and plaster) ... an aborted attempt at an engine dyno (not enough spare time!) ... started on building a Van's RV-6 aircraft (stopped after a medical condition prevents me from enjoying flying) ... changing career paths from electronics to Linux and systems administration and now I'm sort-of retired.
Other relevant skills: machining, welding, and generally all mechanical skills. Although my electronic skills are somewhat rusty I've tried to keep them up. My electronic design skills are way outdated: I could easily design a op-amp filter or a BJT amplifier, but these days it seems it's more cookie-cutter. Spend more time researching the right chip for the task and then spend very little time actually "designing" the circuit. I'm not saying that's bad but the skill set has shifted. My programming skills are oriented to sysadmin'ing so more in scripting or, say, custom Linux kernel patches but not a whole lot in large C/C++ projects like rusEFI.
I very much admire efforts like this in that I may be good at taking an idea and running with it but could never create or manage a large project such as this (to me this really is more complex than, say, building a house which is just a lot of gruntwork). I hope to be able to write patches for the rotary and contribute to rusEFI that way. At the moment I see a need for bits ranging from rotary trigger shapes and servo control of the Secondary Auxilliary Port, up to staged injectors (stock on my generation of motor) and servo controlled Exhaust Valve (à la BMW motorcycles), water/alcohol injection and supercharger boost control. I also have an idea for a skip-mode idle for bridge- and peripheral-port rotaries to make them clean(-ish) and street-able. For those that aren't familiar with rotaries these port styles are comparable to a piston engine with very large cam overlap with all the benefits and penalties that come with that. Disregarding my racing background I've always wanted to keep my street car a street car: I don't consider drive-ability, economy, and, yes, low emissions as optional. Also, since I am somewhat anti-MS Windows (those who know me use the word fanatical) and pro-Free software I may also contribute in any areas concerned with eliminating any dependencies that may exist (if they do, I haven't found any yet).
I expect I won't be posting too often so I'm making it up with this overly long one
.Chris
PS: I've just made my Tindle order. Am I right in thinking the STMF32 Brain Board is copy/pasted from the Frankenso board (or the other way around)? Is the layout on the Frankenso 0.2 board usable?
... well I do have slides somewhere (do young people even know what they are?) I'll have to dig through thousands of them (from a young age I envisioned organizing all my pictures as a "later" retirement project so I could put it off at the time). But thinking about it I realized though that I have no pictures of the EFI chassis. I built it. I know what it looks like