Speeduino EFI

Well, here it is, my latest project and by far my most ambitious. Speeduino EFI.

Despite having owned 40-something cars, there’s one thing I haven’t had a play with yet; tuning ECUs. I have had a couple of cars with Link and Power FC ECUs in them, but they came all setup and ready to go by the previous owners (not always with a good tune, even though it was done by a pro “tuner”).

A while back I read a post on another forum I’m on about this thing they were building called a Speeduino. A cheap version of Megasquirt essentially. Upon further investigation I was hooked. An open source, low-cost full ECU? I’m in!

I was already interested in the Megasquirt but put off by the cost, it ends up being not much cheaper than a full spec Link ECU and isn’t as refined. Its appeal is DIY, but I’m not going to pay a premium for that.

Speeduino is an open source, DIY, flexible, low-cost engine management system based on Arduino. It originally started as a project to build a low-cost ECU for a go-kart, and from there it’s developed into a system that can control a wide variety of engines in full size cars. It’s very much an ongoing project in its early stages, but already it’s proving itself and there are a few cars happily running off it with great results. Its got some great features, there’s a list here.

A few days later I purchased a few 0.3.3 boards, and all the components i need to build a couple of them. I have also purchased a couple of cheap eBay Arduino Megas and a 14point7 Spartan2 wideband controller. Everything is slowly starting to trickle in, and I’m getting ready to start building the Speeduino boards up now.

I have also purchased a whole lot of other things to help build them, like a new temp controlled soldering iron, anti-static gear and a PCB stand. I’m also waiting on a bluetooth module so I can tune wirelessly and use my phone to display gauges for monitoring the car.

Today I fired up my new Arduino, loaded the Speeduino firmware to it and got it to connect to TunerStudio (the tuning software), where I then successfully burnt a test tune to the Arduino and I had an open channel of communication. This marks the official start of the project.

I haven’t yet got a car to install it in once it’s built, but I’m working on that at the moment. I’ll keeping this up to date with my progress.