lecture notes for week 8 and 9

Here are the lecture notes for week 8 and 9. Mind you that a test will be held at week 8 (4th Feb.)

Fuel Systems lecture notes for week 5 and week 6

Here are the lecture notes for Fuel Systems week 5 and week 6. Week 5 was on the 14th Jan. Week 6 will be on the 21st Jan. Please print them and bring to lecture as you may want to scribble some notes on top of it.


lecture wk5


lecture wk6

HCCI single cylinder injection and ignition piggy back system

This was done many-many months ago. Now I don't even remember how it should work exactly. But this was built to help my colleague doing his PhD work on HCCI engine. HCCI stands for homogenous charge compression ignition. He was working on a single cylinder direct injection research engine and trying to convert that to HCCI operation. The idea was to build a piggy back system that would take over the injection and ignition control of the engine. The system would truncate the fuel delivery pulse so that a very lean operation would ensue. The system was also supposed to cut off the ignition when operating in HCCI mode. To assist combustion, alternate firing of the spark was desired (alternate cycle will have ignition spark). There was also a swicth that would allow the engine to operate either on HCCI or on normal mode.

Sadly, the system was never tested. As I completed building it, my friend had found other options. Nonetheless, it was tested using relay in place of fuel injector, and some LED to show the ignition.

Here is the picure of the system. The top half is the simulated engine (relay and injector and LED as ignition).








I don't have the schematics drawn yet. But the source code is here

The HEX file is here

Lecture notes for Fuel Systems week 4

The notes for week 4 lecture as below.Click to download.

notes week 4

Sensorless engine rpm counter update

Here are some videos of the rev counter in action. Unfortunately, my effort to modify the display to make it brighter did not work quite well.

The second and third video are the improved display, by changing the pause time between each LED light up. The LED draws power from the PIC microcontroller, thus need to limit the current. They did not turn up very bright. The videos were captured early morning, before sun rise. I wanted to change the circuit and draw the power for the LED from power supply regulator, but it got messy and I damaged the whole thing.

One more thing, the rev counter works best when there is electrical load from the engine such as headlight or rear windscreen demister. Readings are more stable...

My new project is to develop a control system for a pyrolysis reactor. Part of it involves controlling the speed of a DC motor (in this case a cordless drill), without any speed encoder. I also used Selmaware's StampPlotLite software for computer control and data logging... Maybe more on that project later.

Universal Proportional Integral Derivative Controller

It has been quite a while since my last post. For some reason or another, these 2 months were a bit hectic during the weekends. For the past few weeks the weekends were spent attending the Hajj (Pilgrimage) Crash Course. I am hoping to go for my Hajj this year. More on that later....

I've also put on hold the project on my HUD. I was asked by my colleague to develop a Proportional,Integral and Derivative (PID) controller for an engine test equipment. So that kept me away from the HUD project (will finish the HUD thing later). Then I thought this could also be used for any system that need PID control. This thing will take any 0-5 volt input (you can also make it 0-10 or whatever by putting a voltage divider). Then there is this PID algorithm that will compute the voltage output. The DAC0830 will then output this voltage. You can use to control whatever thing that require voltage output.

Sometimes you need to trick a system by giving false input. For example, you want to tell the engine that the intake manifold pressure is high so that the engine will inject more fuel. You will get more power. This same hardware can also be used. I've developed the source codes for this. You just need to recalibrate the voltage i.e. the actual one and the desired one.

Here are the components needed:

1. PIC 16F877 - 1 (RM27)
2. buttons - 4 units
3. DAC0830LCN - 1 unit (RM10)
4. op amp LF351N - 1 unit
5. 2pole dipswitch -
6. npn transistor C337 - 1 unit
7. relay (automotive type) CMA51-S-12V - 1 unit
8. LCd display
9. resistors
10. capacitors
11. 20MHz crystal
12 some length of wires

Oh ya, you also need the negative voltage supply. I got it from the old PC power supply. See my previous post on using this power supply.

PID source code is here . The hex file is here

Signal modifier code is here .The hex file is here

I don't have the schematics yet. Maybe later....

not much progress this week

this weekend busy with some wedding receptions. The sensorless rpm meter progress was slow. Still struggling to get the right amount of lag filter into the codes.

The display is also a bit too dim for HUD during the midday. Will try to perfect this thing next week.