Over the weekend I went out to Oregon for a wedding. While I was there, I visited Brent and his little home electronics lab to see about modifying my MicroSquirt to be able to run a stepper motor for idle air control. Previously I had determined exactly what modifications were needed. Since Brent is more skilled with all things electronic, I asked him to do the modifications.
As Brent was working on connecting wires to pins 9, 10, and 12 on the MicroSquirt CPU (a MCS12C64 Freescale chip), disaster struck.
We ended up with a broken pin on the CPU and a lifted trace on pins 9 and 10. The lifted traces aren’t such a big deal but the broken pin on the CPU is too small to fix with the tools we have available to us. I contacted Matt at DIY Auto Tune for his thoughts and to see if we could possibly buy a new chip from him to put onto the board. Alas, we would need a BDM cable to program the chip once it is replaced. Those cables run a couple hundred bucks. At that point, I might as well buy the updated MicroSquirt V3 to replace my V2.
I have an email in with Peter at PF Tuning, on the recommendation of Matt at DIY Auto Tune. Perhaps he will be able to fix the MicroSquirt and add on the circuitry for stepper control for less money than it would cost for me to buy a MicroSquirt V3, the spark controller that DIY Auto Tune makes (the V3 can’t support direct drive of spark generators), and some solution other than stepper control for idle air control. We shall see soon.