Well, they’re finally been released! Yes, the cutting edge electronic kits which I seem to have been writing about for ever are now on the shelves, ready and raring to go.

For those of you who haven’t been following events, the electronic projects have been developed by Silicon Chip publications, the company that produces Silicon Chip magazine. (Web Publications, the publisher of AutoSpeed, puts up the on-line version of Silicon Chip.) I’ve worked as a freelance journalist for Silicon Chip for many years, and it was in that role that I helped develop the electronic car projects. The final prototypes were finished about a year ago and I was running working examples in my cars in the year before that – so as you can see, for me they’ve been around for a very long time! (Which is probably why I started writing about them in AutoSpeed too early!)

The reason for the delay in their release is nothing to do with a need to re-work prototypes or anything like that. The wait has a much simpler reason: it’s taken Silicon Chip Publications this long to produce the book which contains all the projects. But now the book is out – it’s called High Performance Electronics for Cars – and all the projects are available as kits from Jaycar Electronics or through the AutoSpeed Shop. (If there is the demand, the kits will also be available fully built and tested through the AutoSpeed shop.)

So has the wait has been worth it? I sure think so! And I don’t say that because I co-authored the book with brilliant electronics engineer John Clarke, but because I genuinely believe that the projects allow people to achieve a range of car modifications which were previously impossible to do simply and cheaply. In addition to the 16 projects, the book also contains really good background chapters on how engine management and other electronic car systems work. The latter are included because with these projects it’s easy to modify auto trans control, power steering weight control – even active four wheel drive control!

The simplest of the kits are those that are generic building blocks. For example, there’s the Frequency Switch (AUD$35.95). I’ve given up counting how many times I’ve seen plaintive requests on discussion groups from people who want to operate a shift-light, or change the switching revs of an active intake manifold. Well, now it’s easy – you can pick up a frequency signal from the injectors, crank-angle sensor, the ECU tacho output or even road speed sensor. And when the right speed is reached, over clicks a 5-amp relay – so you can directly switch lights, buzzers, solenoids….you name it.

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One of the difficulties in assessing cars – whether new, secondhand or modified – is that no matter how extensive the spec sheet, you can never tell how well the cars drive until you do just that… drive them.

As I write this I’m in Sydney, here for the week with Michael Knowling to collect lots of stories. A few days ago we were at MRT Performance, the Subaru specialist tuners and modifiers. The company uses the ECU-Tek software package to modify the factory ECU, an approach which works very well. In addition, they often fit upgrade turbos, exhausts and intake systems. Anyway, one of the cars on which we were doing a story was a current model XT Forester. Factory turbocharged, this particular one came with an auto trans.

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Now that new cars (at least here in Australia) are cheaper in real dollars
than at any time in my lifetime, and secondhand cars are so low in cost I am
often disbelieving of the prices being asked, it’s no longer inconceivable that
an enthusiast should own multiple cars.

In fact, if I go to the window of my home office and look out at the car
park, er, I mean side yard, I will see five cars sitting there, all
resident in this household of two adults and one baby boy. There’s my 1998 Lexus
LS400, of which I have written much in the past; the recently acquired ’99
hybrid Prius, again of which much has been – and is to be – written; the V6
turbo Nissan Maxima (is it 1988?) which runs lots of mods; and a largely
untouched Toyota Crown Supercharger, which is an ’88 model.

(While that seems like rather a lot of Toyotas, that was never the buying
intention. The Lexus came after the experience with my partner’s ’91 model,
which so amazed me that I followed in her footsteps; the current Prius is one of
the world’s most impressive cars – and the 1999 Japanese import model the
closest I can afford; and the Crown came into the stable when I wanted a
supercharged six.)

And the fifth car? I’ll come to that in a moment.

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It seems to be a recurring
theme in my life. I get besotted with a product – normally one much more
expensive than I can afford at the time – and I hanker after it year after year.

And, eventually, I often
end up buying it.

Many, many years ago it was
a Canon Typestar 5 mini word processor – I saw one being used by a lecturer when
I was a student teacher and I decided on the spot that I just had to have one.
The fact that I ended up buying the Brother equivalent was of no consequence.

A similar situation
happened with a Bose Wave Radio – I saw one at a hi-fi show demo and decided
that one day I would own one. It took about ten years but in the end I did buy
it – and, like the other products that have entered this subconscious hedonistic
buyers’ paradise, it has been a purchase made without longstanding regret. After
all, I’ve had just the same thoughts about other consumer goods that have often
ended up (finally) entering my life.

Of course, being realistic,
the Cessna Citation hasn’t yet appeared on my (imaginary) personal runway, and
the Zodiac inflatable with the 4-stroke Honda outboard is still resident in the
shop and not my garage.

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In recent months there’s
been a change in our editorial policy of running letters from readers.

Over the last couple of
years we’ve tended to select just enough to fill about 1000 words. But after
thinking about it, we’ve now decided to run as many as possible.

That has two advantages:
you – the reader – are much more likely to have your right of reply – or right
of comment – published to the same audience who can access the other articles.
And secondly, by looking at the number of letters that we publish on different
topics, it’s clearer which articles are getting the greatest response. So if we
make a mistake, and one reader notices it, we’ll publish the one email. But if
four readers pick it out and write to us about it, we’ll publish all four
emails.

Reader democracy in action,
if you like.

But while we may have the
very best of intentions in publishing as many reader emails as possible,
there’re still plenty that are simply impossible to put on-line. Take one that
we received just today. With obvious omissions of detail, here it is:

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It’s not very many years ago that we all used to laugh at Sixties ‘Yank Tanks’. Enormous vehicles, vastly overweight, with simple suspensions and huge V8 engines to locomote their bloated forms. 

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It might be rather naïve but it comes as a real shock when you discover that there exist people who apparently believe that cars should be left exactly as the manufacturer made them and that any modification is likely to be a retrograde step.

Having been immersed in car modification and other technical circles for a very long time, I’d literally forgotten that there are people like this around.

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One of the things I am conscious of in the articles that I write for AutoSpeed is that their thrust is more and more towards automotive electronics.

The articles vary from pretty simple – as I write this I have just completed a story on a do-it-yourself factory appearance alarm flasher – to complex, with the wiring-up of the traction control disabler which we covered in a series (starts at Modifying Electronic Car Handling Systems, Part 1) being an example of the latter.

I’ve always been interested in electronics and while I am not very skilled in the area, I can often come up with the concept of what I’d like an electronics project to achieve – and then other people can design it for me. But I do have enough knowledge to solder together simple kits, wire-up relays, and so on.

What concerns me is that for those that don’t have these basic electronics skills, much automotive modification being covered in AutoSpeed will be lacking in relevance. Well, that’s not quite true – our article readership stats show clearly there’s a helluva lot of people worldwide who are very interested in applying electronic modification ideas to cars.

But equally, our emails show that many people have difficulty in wiring these circuits up!

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It was after I nearly ran over an old woman that I thought I’d better make the modification.

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