12 b
My objection to all EFI's on the market is; I am not sure what they
will do in some unforeseen scenario. In an aircraft it is a life or
death environment. What goes up MUST come down.
The flooding of all new RX8's is a good example. Ford was involved
with Mazda then and Ford extensively tests all new vehicles. They
missed it. They also missed it on the apex seal oil injection.
I don't begin to know what some bodies EFI is going to do under all
circumstances. Even if I had total access to the source code. If it
was written in C it would be Greek to me anyway as it takes years to
learn C. With most EFI's the source code is secret anyway.
I suspect this is the reason the FAA refuses to certify EFI and they
do have the source code.
I have written my share of complex software in assembly language and
it is near impossible to predict all possible situations or
scenarios. At least In assembly you know exactly what every
instruction is going to do. In any high level language you do not.
BASIC however is much much easier to learn than C.
That is why I suggest one Maximite per injector. It is as simple as
possible and highly redundant. Same goes for the throttle pot and a
555. If you want engine parameter recording and or instrument panel
display use a separate Maximite and software. If there is a bug in
that no big deal.
If there is a bug in your EFI software that is a big deal. Megasquirt
is not widely used in aircraft. That is true for all after market
EFI's with the exception of Tracy's. Tracy had his share of
unforeseen problems as well. They called it glider time :-) He wrote
it in assembly language so he knew far more about it than anybody
using it. He did not release the source code until recently and
believe me it was very complicated. About half just to control the
ignition.
I used to be a fan of Megasquirt back when they published the source
code in Motorola 6800 assembly language. The 6800 was simpler than
the 6502 I used so I could at least understand what they were trying
to do. They now use C.
That is fundamentally why we fly the Motec TTC at Oxnard airport. If
the engine quits we are always near enough to the air port to dead
stick it in.
Paul Lamar
Hi Paul, I cannot understand why anyone would want to go through all
this B.S. for EFI when a simple mechanical throttle body is just as
good with MANUAL control of leaning (Ellison or Rotec) I had an
Ellison in my previous Long EZ for EIGHTEEN YEARS ! It NEVER gave me
any trouble and was the most economical device ever. When I took off
the original antiquated carb (M.S.) the improvement was amazing, more
power, better economy etc. It appeared to be extremely resistant to
carb icing as I tried to get it to ice up on known icing days, it
wouldn't ice up! Cheers Chris Hoskins.
I think you will need two if your looking for 250 HP.
Paul Lamar
Testing any EFI safely would be quite simple. I can add EFI to my
currently flying IO 360, fly it with my mixture out at Idle cut off
while flying the EFI. Any problems with the EFI just pull the breaker
and go back to mechanical. The Lycoming system can be easily adapted to
any engine for complete mechanical backup.
Sometimes I think people make things too difficult.
Kevin Alderman
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