25 Dec
2006
25 Dec
'06
12:07 p.m.
What people want and expect out of equipment has
changed. If it hadn't,
we'd all still be driving around in Morris Minors. That's actually a
I wish I was!
good example - it's impossible to achieve modern
emissions figures from
a car engine fitted with a carburettor, and there is a lot to go wrong
in one. Fuel injection systems keep better track of mixture giving
You know, it all my years of car repair (although I don't drive, I've
repaired my father's cars for 30 years or so), I've only ever had to do
2 carburetter repairs. A needle valve that stuck closed, and a torn
diaphragm in a Znetih CDS.
cleaner emissions and better economy, and there's
less to go wrong. If
anything does go wrong, it will tell you what's upset it.
And now he has this Skoda with an electronic controller for the
igntiion/injhection and another one for the transmission. Sure I can read
out the fault codes and follow the procedures in the workshop manual if
it goes wrong. But if it fails '7 miles from nowherr and beyond' I think
I would have a much better chance of fixing a carburetter than this
system. (as indeed I once did to a friend's Land Rover. Seriously, the
police called me to say this chap had broken down and he felt I was the
one person who could get it going again. I did. A bit of insulating tape
to patch up the torn diaphragm in the carbutetter got him going again and
got him home. Next day he fitted a new diaphragm.
Look at household appliances, too - how much do you think it costs to
make that big cam switch inside a washing machine? It's much cheaper to
replace all that with a PIC microcontroller (most common MCU I've seen
in washing machines) and a few triacs, maybe a relay or two.
Furthermore, if it turns out that there's a problem (Hey, the half-hour
wash cycle doesn't rinse properly!) it's easy to fix.
Eh? I've rebuilt those cam-timer programmers. And I could do it again.
Much more quickly than having to reapir something based on a PIC with no
source code or even object code available.
-tony