ffastje <ffastje@cox.net> wrote:
> Does anyone remember an ad that had a box that i think plugged into the
> cigarette lighter
> and measured 0to 60 times and the likes?
I'd offer you the use of the DML's G-Tech Pro (donated by Sam
Parthemer), but somebody absconded with it many moons ago. :-(
I never got to use the G-Tech myself, so I can't comment as to its
accuracy. Sean Meldrum and myself actually started to collaberate
some time ago on building a similar device. I even went so far as to
spend some pretty decent money on a couple of accelerometers (which
sit on the shelf to this day), but as with most of my projects,
nothing ever came of it. :-)
There might be another fairly inexpensive method also - I started
playing around with this too, but never got very far. I don't even
recall the name of it now, but somebody wrote a software program to
perform the same function. How it works is you use an inductive
pickup or a direct connection to your coil trigger wire and plug this
into the microphone port on a laptop. You then basically get going in
3rd or 4th gear at a fairly low RPM, start recording, and hammer the
throttle. Let off whenever you want (when you get to your redline
usually), and stop recording. Each pulse of the ignition makes a
"tick" in the sound file, and this program would read the WAV file.
Time is built into the sound file of course, and by counting the
ticks, the program knows each time a spark plug fires. By inputting
various information such as how many cylinders your engine is, the
ratio of the transmission gear you used, the rearend ratio, tire size,
vehicle weight, etc. it can compute exactly how far you went and in
what time and could compute a torque and horsepower number. You'd
want to make two runs, one in each direction (to compensate for uneven
ground) and average them. Anyway, a pretty cool idea I thought as it
would be a pretty darn accurate dyno for not a lot of money,
especially if you've already got a laptop. I think the program was
shareware or donation-ware for $20 or so. As I said, I played around
with it, but was not able to get decent results because my recordings
were always too noisy, making it difficult for the program to count
each individual "tick". Probably a simple circuit could have been
built to suppress the extra noise but I didn't know that at the time.
Other projects took precedence and I never did get around to taking
another look at it. Anyway, that is a possible option to look into if
you are interested - maybe in the past 10 years or so, it has become
more refined or maybe there are other similar programs out there.
Another thought - it might be possible to do basically the same
thing (or even 1/4 mile and 0-60 runs) using a GPS and some math.
This should work as long as the recording resolution of the GPS is
high enough.
Or, as others have said, just take it to the track. :-) I can
definitely see the attraction of having something to be able to do
testing at any time though, since you don't need to work around the
schedule of the track, and in my case, the track is a 3 hour round
trip.
--
-Jon-
.- Jon Steiger -- jon@dakota-truck.net or jon@jonsteiger.com -.
| '96 Kolb Firefly, '96 Suzuki Intruder, Miscellaneous Mopars |
`-------------------------------- http://www.jonsteiger.com --'
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Apr 01 2010 - 00:17:53 EDT