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Omex Or Megasquirt 3 Ecu


Guest Scotty84

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Guest Scotty84

Hi guys after some advise.

 

Got a friend looking at putting a zetec in his 7. He is at the stage of looking at ECU's

 

He has been advised by the tuner to go for the Megasquirt 3 ECU over the OMEX ecu.

What's your advise peeps?

 

Megasquirt or OMEX?

 

It will be a 2.0 blacktop with standard intake with a view of going throttle bodies in next year or two.

 

Cheers peeps.

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I went on a factory tour to Omex at the weekend and the main man said that ECUs like the mega squirt is not road legal as it is not type approved, so can only be used on track cars. I have no idea if that is true or not but it is worth thinking about.

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Not sure what you mean by "type approval", approved by whom, to do what? DVLA/VOSA only require that the engine conforms to the emission regulations for that age of engine, how it is achieved is of no interest to them.

 

Megasquirt is an open source DIY ECU, you can buy it in kit form, and there is lots of amateur support. the current site is http://www.megasquirt.co.uk/although there are some copies out there http://www.msextra.com/doc/clones/index.html and there appears to be some battles over firmware licences, but the hardware appears to work, however you get what you pay for.

 

I agree with the above, some of the software can be baffling, most tuners work best with what they know, so their advice may well be tainted.

 

Me I prefer Emerald, because it works, for me, Omex and Megasquirt also work, but I find their software a bit, odd, but that is probably because I don’t deal with it day to day. There is a French ECU that appears to work well, and the software was not bad, it was in English, when I found the setting, and behaved well when tuning a car at IVA.

 

But to be fair the tuner studio has always worked to.

 

You pay your money, and take your choice, I would go with the closeness of a reputable tuner for your chosen ECU.

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I would think maybe they are thinking along the lines of CE approval for electronics, however that applies to car ECUs - the components that go into electronics are probably specced at automotive grade, which means they have higher tolerances, better quality, resistance to moisture/extreme temperatures and so forth, mainly on the microcontrollers and logic ICs on the board but also things like the power supply components.

 

Think about the legal ramifications if manufacturers sell a car and then a safety-critical system fails; they would be thrown up a legislative wall and sued until the cows come home - in fact I'm pretty sure this has happened a few times, although I don't have any references.

 

So imagine Joe Bloggs knocking out an ECU design (believe me; I've thought about it myself), probably loosely based on Megasquirt but could very well be his own design. Does he take the time to design it to the higher grade, more expensive components? Does he submit it for testing, which is most likely going to cost him several thousand pounds for each piece of hardware (and revision thereof)?

 

I don't know the answer for the various manufacturers, but that's the question - completely depends on what level of quality/safety/testing you expect of your ECU. As said above, they are all much of a muchness in terms of features (although it's worth looking closely if you want to do anything clever).

 

Emerald have some new feature coming along like traction/launch control, drive by wire, but be warned - not obvious from their website - they want an additional £150 to enable these features on a K6 :(

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No, it just means that that it been inspected with regard to IVA regulations and complies with those regulations.

 

"Road Legal" is a meaningless term in reality and Type Approval is only really relevant to groups of vehicles.It's an approval given to a group of identical vehicles, based on the inspection of either a single (or a number of) examples of that type.

 

A kit car are generally unique, they're inspected to IVA standards - Individual Vehicle Approval.

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surely if it passes its MOT its legal? My understanding is that type approval means that the manufacturer can produce cars to the same spec and standard without having to IVA every one (limited to so many a year I believe). so the only benefit of type approving an ECU is if you want it to be used on a production vehicle from the factory!

 

Caterham have type approval allowing them to produce factory car without IVA so would only be able to use a type approved ECU otherwise would not be legal! if owner then changes this after it has left the showroom that up to them as long as it passes the MOT.

 

of course I maybe completely wrong on this!

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You could be travelling to a pre-booked MOT in a car with no brakes. The car would technically legal, but if you had an accident you'd probably find it suddenly isn't.

 

Whether something is road legal or not is only really proved at the point you have to defend an allegation that you've committed an offense.

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