Sunday, January 22, 2017

Make America Flood Again

In my last post, I showed how I installed a Flex Fuel sensor on the Falcon. And while I try to show the details of how stuff gets done, I always still end up leaving out significant portions of the story. I guess that's just how it is. If stuff didn't get left out, it would be the same as just having everyone who reads this blog come over to my house and watch my every move. I don't want that. You don't want that. And most of all, Jen doesn't want that.

One thing I forgot in my last post was to show the mods I made to my Megasquirt relay board to accept an input from the Flex Fuel sensor signal. The relay board is handy, but I'm not sure if I'd use it again in the future. First off, it just doesn't feel as robust as I would like and second, it doesn't have enough input/output terminals on the board. The Megasquirt 2 ECU itself had enough I/O, but the relay board does not. After looking closely at the board, I decided that this was something I could remedy. 

First step was to remove the relay board. In theory it's simple, but so is patting your head with one hand and rubbing your belly with the other (in theory). I got into the driver's footwell in this awesome upside-down-feet-in-the-air position and removed all the wires and screws that held it in place. 


MS2 has a number of spare I/O ports called SPR 1, 2, 3, and 4. I wanted to use the "SPR 3" input for the Flex Fuel sensor. Here, hidden behind a relay, is the spot on the board where SPR1, 2, 3,  and 4 are terminated. They are not really accessible when the board is assembled.


I figured if I could get a wire from the board locations to a terminal block, I would be able to use all of the spare I/O. I found a terminal block on Amazon for a few bucks  and mounted it to the side of the relay board, and ran wires to it from the location behind the relay.





And just like that, I was able to get the Fex Fuel sensor input to the ECU.


On a side note, Jen and I found this neat KIA on our Sunday walk. It's been a bit rainy here in Long Beach.

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