Collections vs. accumulations, was Re: How many collectors?

From: Messick, Gary <Gary.Messick_at_itt.com>
Date: Mon Aug 6 13:11:08 2001

> I am now looking into some of the offspring of convergence
> and hunting down the embedded machines.
> Does anyone know what sort of machine is in the car's
> onboard controller? A few pictures I've found make them
> look like PC104's. These machines are hitting zero value
> quickly and may not last 10 years unless picked up now.
>
>
Depends, Ford used to use Intel derived parts (Actually Intel derived the
8096 family from the custom designed chips Ford paid for [8061 and 8065 if I
remember correctly.] They later had prototypes using the 88K, but then MOT
pulled the plug on that one, so I think they're using a PPC derivative now.

Some of the interesting features of the 8061/8065 were serial address/data
bus. They wanted all the pins they could have for external I/O (temp.
sensors, injector drivers, etc.) The 8061 used the 8096 instruction set,
and the 8065 used the 80196 set. All the chips were proprietary, because of
the stupid serial bus. They did however have a chip that would convert the
serial bus to a standard Intel address/data bus. But I have never seen one
of these outside of Ford. I saw some of the production code that went into
these modules: It's a miracle your car starts at all. The
hardware/software was "cookie cuttered" into the modules. I.e. this
powertrain uses these injectors (hardware/software cut and paste), this
crank position sensor (hardware/software cut and paste) this valve timing
(software cut and paste). Hey how come this module doesn't work? (As you
can probably tell, I worked in module testing!)

I believe GM used mostly 68K derived stuff, have no idea about Chrysler.

I have a friend that OEMs an after market engine controller to a major
aftermarket company. It turns out at least for him, in the beginning, it
was easier to figure out the inputs/output to the module, and tweak those
values, rather than replicating the functions of the entire controller. He
simply placed his module "in-between" the module and the engine, and he
could pretty much play at will with certain functions while letting the OEM
module handle things he didn't care about.
Received on Mon Aug 06 2001 - 13:11:08 BST

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