Diagnostic Equipment

OWON 20MHz Digital storage scope.  Two channels and ahandy USB uplink to a PC.  Utterly invaluable.

Below that is a Thandar Function/Signal generator. Whilst the signal generator can't generate trigger wheel patterns it can generate all sorts of reference/test pulses.  You can also see on the far right of the picture a small powered USB hub.  Not only is the hub essential to allow us to connect enough equipment up to a computer it is also a convenient way to power things such as the Arduino boards that we make extensive use of.

Panasonic Toughbook.  It may not be fast but you can drive a car over it, it's waterproof and critically has a daylight readable (touch) screen. 

Serial port switch-box.  With so much equipment we have to communicate with we don't want to spend all our time finding the right cable and groping round the back of things trying to plug it in.  Instead we connect everything into a serial switch-box so swapping between equipment just takes the press of a button.

JimStim.  If you can look past the mass of wires you can see the JimStim hidden behind.  If you're not familiar with the JimStim it is a board designed to allow you to test Megasquirt systems.  It can simulate a wide range of trigger wheel patterns as well as a whole range of automotive signals, so is a very handy tool.

We also have Megasquirt "Stimulator" boards but that is far less versatile than the JimStim.

Fluke TrueRMS 902 inductive clamp multimeter.  Before we discovered the UT204 this was our meter of choice.  The downside with the Fluke is that it hideously expensive (about 10 times the price of the UT204) and has pretty limited functionality.  What it does it does well though.

UT204 AC/DC inductive clamp multimeter.  A super piece of kit, which unusually for a reasonably priced clamp meter can measure both AC and DC current.  Of course it also does everything else you might reasonably expect of a sophisticated digital multimeter.  We like these a lot!

Altai 10-Amp regulated power supply.  With a wideband lambda sensor needing 5-8 Amps during warm-up we need a fairly powerful power supply to drive them or any other high-current loads.   For high-current devices you don't need lots of fancy controls, having enough grunt is far more important.  With huge heat-sinks on the back this is a heavy box that means business.  Unlike more lightweight supplies this can drive big loads all day long.

 2-Amp digital regulated lab-grade power supply.  On anything sensitive this is what you want to use.  You can regulate either the supply current or the supply voltage so is a very versatile system.  The big limitation is that you can't drive high powered loads but for that we use the bigger 10-Amp supply.

Temperature controlled solder station.  Since ECUs etc are all produced on automated Flow/Wave solder machines we don't need anything fancy in the lab.  What matters is reasonable temperature control, a range of different sizes and shapes of tip and enough power to warm up reasonably quickly. 

Custom Megajolt testing system.  We spent quite some time developing this box of tricks.  It's another Arduino based system, this one is an Arduino Duemilanove with a prototyping shield and an LCD shield stacked on top of it.  It has flexible power options and can run off USB, a power supply or slaved from a TPS-version Megajolt.  At the other end of the box from the power inputs is a DB37 connector into which we have a loom that plugs into the ECU. 

So what does this box of tricks do, well as far as the ECU is concerned it pretends to be an engine and simulates an EDIS module and feeds it a PIP signal.  It also pretends to be a throttle sensor, shift lights, rev counter and all the other inputs and outputs that a Megajolt can handle.  The system receives all the signals from the ECU and displays on the screen both the what it is generating and what it is getting back from the ECU. 

The system sweeps through RPM and allows us to easily test an ECU through a full range of operating conditions.  It compares the RPM signal it is generating with the tacho feed that it is getting back from the ECU.  It shows us the state of all the shiftlight and programmable outputs.  The SAW signal from the ECU is decoded and the ignition advance is also shown on the screen.  

So completely independent of anything other than a power supply we can do a complete ECU diagnostic.  If we also plug in the serial cable we can then do an extra level of diagnostic, comparing what is on the computer screen with the signals were generating and with the outputs from the ECU.

0-28000 RPM Test rig for Trigger-wheels, EDIS and Megajolt ECUs.   This is one of our early test tools.  We can spin wheels at any speed we like and verify wheel/sensor operation against EDIS-4, EDIS-6, EDIS-8 modules and common missing-tooth decoder chips.  The rig has quick-release connectors so we can very quickly swap customer EDIS modules or coil packs in for testing and change between testing 4, 6 and 8-cylinder configurations.

You can also see here the reflective strip on the trigger wheel and the optical rev counter (bottom right). What you can't see in the picture are the line of individual rev counters attached to the EDIS modules and ECU.  Using the optical rev counter we can check the speed completely independently of the electronics.

Non-contact optical tachometer.  This is a piece of equipment that most people didn't know existed so it's worth a bit of explanation.  Lets say you want to know how fast something is spinning but you don't have any direct way of measuring it.  Simply paint a white/silver marker on it or stick a strip of reflective material onto it and point this at it.  This shines a laser at the object and can "see" the light reflected back from the marker and uses that to calculate the speed.  It's not a piece of kit you need to use very often but when you do it is an absolute godsend,

"Dumb" inductive timing light.  Our experience is that the more features that a timing light has the less useful it is in practice.  Adjustable timing lights and those with with RPM readouts get confused and double-read on modern wasted spark systems.  Even adjustable sensitivity is a bit of a luxury.

OBDII interface

Standalone 36-1 and 60-2 Trigger wheel simulator. This has a male mini-timer connector so can be plugged into a loom in place of a crank sensor, thereby allowing the elimination of any wheel/sensor alignment issues during testing.

RPM sweep generator. We don't have any pictures of this at present but it is an Arduino based board that produces a range of RPM signals, sweeping high and low. Great for testing modern anything that expects a modern style low-voltage "tacho" signal. We use this for testing rev counters, shift lights and ECUs.

Techedge Wideband controller simulator.  This is something we use for demo as much as testing purposes.  It takes a 12V power source and outputs an RS232 serial stream and power supply for the Techedge range of wideband displays.  This little black box allows us to perform repeatable diagnostics on a display, independent of any controller.