Projects...

Some areas of interest for me - and which may have some relevance for you. Enjoy.
Rover V8 EFi Retrofit Bosch EFi

My Land Rover was originally fitted with twin 1.75" SU carburettors and while they sort-of worked, my goal was always to look at some kind of fuel injection system. This diary details the full process of retrofitting a fuel injection system manufactured by Bosch and known as the 14CUX Hot Wire - which was taken from a mid 90's Range Rover donor vehicle.

CSS Keyframing

CSS provides keyframe animation techniques, familiar to anyone who has used timeline based environments such as the ancient, now retired Macromedia Director, or Adobe Flash now known as Animate CC. Flash is a curious development environment... justifyably written off as a horror story of endless security weaknesses when embedded in a web page but when used to build stand alone applications code, it is one of the few environments capable of building a common code base for deployment to both the Apple and the Google play store. Its also a great deal more consistent than HTML5 dev environments, such as Phonegap.

EFi Monitor II Fuel Injection Monitor II

An early version of a dashboard mounted monitor designed to display a very limited amount of live, real time data incomming from the fuel injected Land Rover V8 engine. The enclosure for the unit was huge, but it was designed as a stepping stone purely to prove the concept and to work through some of the more tricky communications and electrical noise problems when working in a vehicle.

 
EFi Monitor III Fuel Injection Monitor III

A more recent and much smaller version of the fuel injection monitor - used to display live real time analog data from the two O2 sensors on the exhausts as well as a range of data read directly from a comms link with the 14CUX ECU (Mass air flow, coolant & fuel temperature and throttle position etc). The firmware was coded in C and it used an I2C colour touch screen for the user interface.

Rover V8 Head Rover V8 Head

A diary of notes written during the restoration of the pair of 1974'ish Rover V8 heads.

Land Rover Heater Land Rover Series III Heater Upgrade

Anyone owning a Land Rover Series III will know that the "heater" is about as effective as a mouse breathing heavily inside the vehicle. This is a diary of the steps required to fit the vastly better Defender heater into a Series III vehicle. Every winter I am profoundly grateful that I did this work.

 
Coolant System Land Rover Coolant System

During the winter of 2012, I experienced some odd problems with the cooling system on the Land Rover - where a relatively small amount of antifreeze kept appearing at the front of the engine pooled under the distributor. The lack of any obvious cause was very puzzling given the hoses and nearby thermostat housing was all in good shape.

These worknotes explain the process and motives behind a complete redesign of the expansion tank section of the Land Rover V8 engine cooling system.

Random Patio Random Patio Generator

A number of years ago I worked on an interesting software problem to build an application that could be used to produce a random patio design for a garden. The patio would be made from a number of different size slabs of concrete, sold by an aggregate company and known in the trade as pavers. Originally this software was coded in VB6, and went through 14 different versions (all distributed free of charge) with each adding more and more features and capabilities. Coding finished way back in 2011 but I still get emails from landscape gardeners who regularly use it.

Funky CSS Menu Interesting Menu Design

I spotted a CSS menu design a short while ago - but found that it didn't work overly well and I also wasn't really sure where it could be used anyway - but its novel "open" idea was so interesting I got hold of the code and made it work properly (and in a way that most users would understand). You can see it working here

 
WP34S User Guide WP 34S RPN Calculator

Engineers are rather partial to calculators employing reverse polish notation. A project was started some years ago to repurpose an existing HP financial calculator, with the objective of developing an uprated version of the magnificent HP42S - arguably the best RPN calculator ever made. The problem was that the user guide was very difficult to read...

Bosch 14CUX Bosch 14CUX

If you're using a 14CUX, it is worth knowing about the useful black and white workshop manual written by Land Rover/Bosch for engineers working on a Hot Wire system. It is available here.