Over winter one of the new projects we have been working on has been a new ECU architecture, intended specifically to meet the needs of plug and play installs using the OEM wiring looms in the cars we cater for. With the wide range of eras of vehicle and variety of ways OEM manufacturers like to do things this was no easy task. While we had been quietly working on the new designs for some time we were galvanised into action after being contacted by our friends over at Beer Money Motorsport (BMM) in the USA who were in dire need of a new hardware design to replace their outgoing ECU range. We looked into our existing range and wrote up a design brief: - Built in capability for the critical systems on the majority of PNP targets
- Up to 8 cylinder capability built in
- Full feature set of the existing ECUs
- Able to support all common mods
- Small form factor below 100x100mm
- Able to support external components and circuits for IO expansion
- Requirement to route 3.3v and 5v out of board for additional vehicle board equipment
After much work we decided to develop a Brain board + Base board style of design in order to meet all of the criteria and give the flexibility and quality that we wanted to deliver. Brain Board
We looked at our existing designs and decided to rework the Proteus design into a smaller form factor, with a rationalised set of hardware outputs and some changes to the IO interface electronics to meet our needs. The result of this is what we codenamed the "Polygonus brain board" - a high performance brain board capable of natively running an 8 cylinder engine with sequential ignition and injection, having knock sensing, CAN, plenty of analog inputs and some extra connection pins added to be able to support extra features added to the base boards.
Base Boards As each vehicle has its own connector, ECU casing design and pin mapping, the base boards are designed to act as an interface between the brain board and the vehicle, providing the necessary vehicle specific components in a robust package. To meet these needs we designed a series of 2oz heavy duty PCBs that take the raw outputs from the brain board, send them to the vehicle specific interface circuits and route them to the vehicle connector. These base boards are designed tough, able to cope with the peak current of any of the OEM circuits without overheating or failures.
The end result of all this work was the new range of BMM ECUs, a new series of high quality, high performance units that will cope with anything their customer can (and will) throw at them.
While BMM will be debuting 4 designs for 1990 to 2005 Miatas, FPP will be bringing out a range of BMW ECUs and some special units for some classic applications.
Going forward we are looking to further develop this range to serve some of the more common tuner applications and fill some gaps in the tuning market that we currently see being ignored.
To get your hands on these units, get in touch with Jesse at Beer Money Motorsport if you are in the USA or contact us for the UK.
https://www.beermoneymotorsports.com
