23 November 2015A NZ GT Four Club member came over to inspect the RC's ECU. The caps in their RC had leaked and blown a track on the board. They needed to look at mine to identify where the track went.
Since the ECU was out, I decided to send it up to Auckland to a friend to get all the caps replaced.
Firstly I provided him with these cap values: 2x 10uf50v; 15uf35v; 100uf10v, 33uf35v; 220uf10v; 47uf63v
He said he had them in his workshop, so the ECU refresh was a go.
Interestingly, he has the equipment to read and write EPROMs, so we had a little conversation about modification of Toyota ECUs. What was interesting was the ability to design custom boards and get them prototyped in batches of 100 or so. So there is the potential to create new RC ECU's if there was ever a need. But after some analysis, there really was little value in doing so as it was just as easy to buy a MegaSquirt or move up to a Link or Haltech due to the prototyping cost.
Once the ECU was in Auckland, Dee had a look over the ECU. He noted the following:
- Just doing some research. These eeproms looks to be masked which means if I try to read it I will get garbage for data.
- Ecu does have a moisture barrier/conformal coating. Looks to be laquer based as isopropyl turns it sticky.
- All the caps are done..im working on thr eprom now. I trying a slip on chip adaptor before i try desoldering it. I should be able to read it without pulling thr chip. Saves melting the lacquer coating and making it look like a mess.
- Its garbled data. The chip has a toyota specific part number so i cant manually identify it. The auto detect mode on eprom reader reckons its a 27c512 chio but data comes back as garbage.
After that, he did ask about setting up a simulation bench so he can probe the logic. But too much effort and I was on a schedule as I was picking up a new project car in Auckland that weekend.
Here are some photos of his work:
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GT Four
Adovansu
"I want to enjoy the powerful and nimble agility behavior."