Engine Monitor

356speed

Before I reinvent the wheel and fall into all the pitfalls...Has anyone ever done any engine monitoring using sensors and a STAMP?
Sort of a dyno? RPM, Oil & Water temps, Oil Pressure, Air Fuel Ratio, Etc?

Thanks

Spiral_72

I've always wanted to! What size engine and BHP? Are we talking an automotive engine? 4cyl? supercharged 8cyl? A 5Hp Briggs & Stratton or?

A tach should be easy, oil & water temps are usually thermistors, oil pressure is usually (used to be) a variable resistor, A/F is read by an O2 sensor and read as voltage far as I know.

Measuring power would be the most difficult by far. Maybe you could use a magnetic brake for small engines <15Hp?? but I dunno how to read 300Hp. I read that on Funny cars they cannot measure 8000 Hp directly so there's a coupling in the drive train to measure strain..... which converts to torque in some manner. The atricle didn't mention if it was linear.

That's a very cool project. I hope you build it

icepuck

If it is for car/truck and it was made in 1997 or later then that data can be extracted from the vehicles OBDII diagnostics port.
Here's some info worth reading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics
-dan

Capt. Quirk

A BS2 could have easily collected the data from some of the early DynoJet Inertia dyno's, mainly because all the sensors were so slow. A BS2 isn't what DynoJet used, but the point is; depending on how fast do you want to collect samples, and how accurate your data needs to be, you have choices.

Perhaps if you were more specific.

Bill M.

$WMc%

Very easy project.
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Take a look in StampWorks manual for some idea's.
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http://www.parallax.com/Portals/0/Downloads/docs/books/sw/Web-SW-v2.1.pdf
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RPM,Voltage,Temp.Oil Presser, Not hard to read.
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Exhaust gas temp's and rich/lean indicators can be read as well. But theres a little more to learn about the senors properties.
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I have a lot more info if your interested.

BR

Don't know if you're open to the Prop instead of stamp, but there's this automotive data logger system from last year's Propeller design contest.

yarisboy

I'm doing some rudimentary stuff for my car now with the Prop. The tach signal has to be isolated whether you use a BS2 or a Prop but I've found two of the signals I need from the car are already 3.3 volts. For my applications that's a plus-2 (for the Prop) right-OUTA-the-gate so to speak.

Capt. Quirk

This will make OBD-II much easier!

The STN-1100 Serial interface is well within BS2 capabilities. The BS2(xx) would certainly be much easier to start with. The BS2(xx) could handle all the data acquisition, display and input functions. Then let the STN-1100 handle all the difficult stuff.

If you are interested, download the StampWorks Manual on pdf. It has tutorials for data storage with an external eeprom, adding a parallel display, then add a key pad.

Install it into a project box similar to this. (you will need to determine display and key pad dimensions before you find a hand-held box, if that's what you want)

Afterwards Move on to the Propeller and program it do everything.