Hello, and please give a little guidance

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ironmanisanemic
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Hello, and please give a little guidance

Post by ironmanisanemic »

Hello all,

I am located in Washington State and would like to say hello to everyone! I am happy to have found this project and am hopeful that i will be able to contribute to the development.

I am looking at converting my 1968 Ford F100 truck over to EFI and have been doing some research on different engine control solutions, and feel like this is the one i will be settling on. Although i have been finding that documentation is a bit lacking compared to other platforms, so that leads me into my questions.

First, does rusefi support the GM 7/8 pin HEI modules? To start i only plan to run batch fire and computer controlled ignition running through my distributor. Reading the megasquirt documentation (as well as the speeduino) shows how i can wire up and setup their hardware to control this module, but i dont see any mention of what ignition systems are supported with rusefi.

Second, looking forward i eventually plan to convert to sequential fueling, and possibly COP. But again i dont know what trigger systems are supported on the crank and cam.

Any advice is helpful, and if this is addressed somewhere i appologize, i have done a bunch of searching, but have come up with nothing.

Thank you
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Re: Hello, and please give a little guidance

Post by AndreyB »

To be honest I am not exactly sure what HEI does, Is that a pre-EFI solution which reads VR signal and implements some rudimentary ignition control? http://www.megamanual.com/ms2/GM_7pinHEI.htm ? What value do you see in it comparing with a standalone?


Current rusEfi triggers are listed at https://rusefi.com/wiki/index.php?title=Manual:Software:Trigger - that include any skipped wheel configuration.
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kb1gtt
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Re: Hello, and please give a little guidance

Post by kb1gtt »

High Energy Ignition (HEI) is an old school GM ignition system. Back in the day it was handy as you did not need an ECU to run your engine. If you lost the signal from the ECU you would end up at a specific advance. As well the Dwell was set by the HEI unit. Basically HEI was a step between a mechanical advance, and computer controlled advanced. It was basically electrically controlled advance. The HEI unit was a key feature for early MS days. The ECU simply allowed things like better emissions, or power by controlling the advance. While controlling an HEI system is possible from a hardware standpoint, as of Feb 2019, the rusEFI firmware does not currently support HEI. For rusEFI to support it, I recall you basically need to take your desired advance, and turn it into a PWM signal which is then sent to the HEI unit. The duty of the PWM correlates to the desired advance. I think it would be fairly easy to implement in software. The hard part is dealing with the crank angle signals. The HEI unit needs a specific crank wheel pattern, and that has to be sent or simulated to the HEI unit. While rusEFI can decode this crank wheel, it can be a bugger if you do not have that crank wheel on your engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_energy_ignition

If you are putting a different ignition system on your Ford engine, I would suggest using a more modern ignition system. As far as I can tell, direct control over a standard coil has not been a problem. I believe putting the HEI on your Ford means putting the GM crank wheel on your Ford and figuring out how to mount a sensor. This can be a difficult task. If you are doing this I would suggest a standard Ford crank wheel, and standard Ford crank sensor. Then direct drive the coil. I think you'll find this a much easier path. I believe getting your HEI on a Ford is a bit of a bugger. As well keep in mind if you are a horse power guy, and if you have a bad connection to your ECU, the HEI can easily damage the mechanical bits of your engine.
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ironmanisanemic
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Re: Hello, and please give a little guidance

Post by ironmanisanemic »

russian wrote:
Sun Feb 24, 2019 1:54 am
To be honest I am not exactly sure what HEI does, Is that a pre-EFI solution which reads VR signal and implements some rudimentary ignition control? http://www.megamanual.com/ms2/GM_7pinHEI.htm ? What value do you see in it comparing with a standalone?


Current rusEfi triggers are listed at https://rusefi.com/wiki/index.php?title=Manual:Software:Trigger - that include any skipped wheel configuration.
The HEI module takes in the vr sensor signal from the distributor and an advance signal from the ecu and handles everything for sparking the coil internally. The reason I wanted to use this is due to not knowing if rusefi or really any other engine management system can deal with the vr sensor and 8 pulse wheel signal directly. There is no missing tooth because the distributor is handling the firing order.
kb1gtt wrote:
Sun Feb 24, 2019 3:29 am
High Energy Ignition (HEI) is an old school GM ignition system. Back in the day it was handy as you did not need an ECU to run your engine. If you lost the signal from the ECU you would end up at a specific advance. As well the Dwell was set by the HEI unit. Basically HEI was a step between a mechanical advance, and computer controlled advanced. It was basically electrically controlled advance. The HEI unit was a key feature for early MS days. The ECU simply allowed things like better emissions, or power by controlling the advance. While controlling an HEI system is possible from a hardware standpoint, as of Feb 2019, the rusEFI firmware does not currently support HEI. For rusEFI to support it, I recall you basically need to take your desired advance, and turn it into a PWM signal which is then sent to the HEI unit. The duty of the PWM correlates to the desired advance. I think it would be fairly easy to implement in software. The hard part is dealing with the crank angle signals. The HEI unit needs a specific crank wheel pattern, and that has to be sent or simulated to the HEI unit. While rusEFI can decode this crank wheel, it can be a bugger if you do not have that crank wheel on your engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_energy_ignition

If you are putting a different ignition system on your Ford engine, I would suggest using a more modern ignition system. As far as I can tell, direct control over a standard coil has not been a problem. I believe putting the HEI on your Ford means putting the GM crank wheel on your Ford and figuring out how to mount a sensor. This can be a difficult task. If you are doing this I would suggest a standard Ford crank wheel, and standard Ford crank sensor. Then direct drive the coil. I think you'll find this a much easier path. I believe getting your HEI on a Ford is a bit of a bugger. As well keep in mind if you are a horse power guy, and if you have a bad connection to your ECU, the HEI can easily damage the mechanical bits of your engine.
Actually hei was a distributor based system and it just used a standard vr sensor inside the distributor. There were some that didnt have computer feedback, so there was still a mechanical advance, and later implemented computer controlled spark advance and had no mechanical advance. It is trivial to hook up the Ford distributor to the hei ignition module, there is no trigger wheel to adapt, as both systems used a vr sensor and a trigger wheel that equals the cylinder count. It's actually harder to adapt ford's own computer controlled ignition system called TFI. This is because it uses an optical pickup and a special pickup wheel that indicates cylinder 1 with a shorter pulse tooth then the rest of the cylinders.
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kb1gtt
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Re: Hello, and please give a little guidance

Post by kb1gtt »

Optical pickup's are typically top notch for accurate crank angle detection. What ever crank tooth pattern you get from this, it can be decoded by rusEFI.

Yes rusEFI can decode the 8 tooth crank wheel. If the crank decoder does not already exist, once @ has the crank wheel information, it typically takes him a day to create a new crank wheel decoder. From memory I think there is already an 8 tooth decoder, but I do not know if this is your specific wheel or not.

The rusEFI crank wheel decoder is very flexible. I have not seen a crank wheel yet which it cannot decode. The only issue I've seen so far is that the specific wheel pattern has not yet been decoded. A new crank wheel typically becomes an option after a short development cycle.

External igniters like the J701 are fairly low cost, and easy to install. I have a pencil schematic found here.
https://rusefi.com/wiki/index.php?title=Manual:Hardware#J701_NEON_engine_schematics
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ironmanisanemic
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Re: Hello, and please give a little guidance

Post by ironmanisanemic »

kb1gtt wrote:
Sun Feb 24, 2019 4:43 am
Optical pickup's are typically top notch for accurate crank angle detection. What ever crank tooth pattern you get from this, it can be decoded by rusEFI.

Yes rusEFI can decode the 8 tooth crank wheel. If the crank decoder does not already exist, once @ has the crank wheel information, it typically takes him a day to create a new crank wheel decoder. From memory I think there is already an 8 tooth decoder, but I do not know if this is your specific wheel or not.

The rusEFI crank wheel decoder is very flexible. I have not seen a crank wheel yet which it cannot decode. The only issue I've seen so far is that the specific wheel pattern has not yet been decoded. A new crank wheel typically becomes an option after a short development cycle.

External igniters like the J701 are fairly low cost, and easy to install. I have a pencil schematic found here.
https://rusefi.com/wiki/index.php?title=Manual:Hardware#J701_NEON_engine_schematics
It is not crank based, it is located inside the distributor, so it will be 1/2 RPM. Will this cause any issues in decoding it?
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kb1gtt
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Re: Hello, and please give a little guidance

Post by kb1gtt »

Negative it will not cause issues with crank angle decoding.
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