What's This Megasquirt?

[Guest SmokingMesaMan]

What is it then?

 

What does it do, improvements etc?

 

Sorry for the somewhat dumb question.

Rob

[DrSeuss 0]

http://www.megasquirt.info

[Hilgie 16 2 Cars]

It's a standalone engine management system.

[Dream Weaver 2]

That you have to build yourself

 

Decent system, but you need to be pretty good with the soldering iron though.

Edited December 25, 2005 by Dream Weaver

[pug_life 0]

yeh comes in lots of packets

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v486/pug_life/RIMG0017.jpg

 

and you spend ages soldering it all together to make this

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v486/pug_life/RIMG0021.jpg

[DrSeuss 0]

i'm thinking of doing a group buy where i'd offer some fully built up.

 

A few people i know are building kits. But none of them have started mapping it. Which is where ecu's show themselves up most easily.

[lordvader 0]

I've had a look at the megasquirt site, as well as a few posts by other people who've used the system, and something doesn't make sense to me.

The 205 uses an AFM to deterine how much fuel to use. Megasquirt doesn't seem to take airflow into account, and apparently most megasquirt users have removed the AFM from their car. How can it therefore determine how much fuel to use, if it doesn't know how much air there is ? The only sensors I've seen on the schematics are temperatures ...

[DrSeuss 0]

it uses a MAP sensor (manifold absolute pressure). Along with the air temperature to work backwards to the PV=nRT thus determining (V) the volume of air.

 

So it doesn't physically measure the volume of air, it just takes a series of educated guess's from other sensors.

[TVH 0]

IMO, soldering the pcb is the easy part. Installing and configuring was toughest at least for me. Fuel only applications are easy but spark makes it complicated. If you go for Megasquirt, remember YOU build it, YOU install it, YOU map it, YOU maintain it. Megasquirt should not be considered as the cheapest full ecu solution, it's not a product, it's a project. I often say Megasquirt project is very much like GNU/Linux project, you can beat the s*it out of commercial products with both of them, but you really have to learn it and know what you are doing.

 

Don't be frightened, once you have learned it, it's absolutely great! I was running Megasquirt on XU9JAZ engine, original fuel system except 16v injectors, shortened induction and wasted spark ignition. It ran so sweet! Was even idling smooth!

[DrSeuss 0]

IMO, soldering the pcb is the easy part. Installing and configuring was toughest at least for me. Fuel only applications are easy but spark makes it complicated. If you go for Megasquirt, remember YOU build it, YOU install it, YOU map it, YOU maintain it. Megasquirt should not be considered as the cheapest full ecu solution, it's not a product, it's a project.

 

I fully agree with that statement. Megasquirt is an excercise in diy mapping, the ecu itself is well featured though, equivalent to KMS or emerald roughly.