Chalky

I have a BMC ST engine in my B...

There were 2 varients. The one the public saw had a stepper motor controlling the cold start device and implemented an auto choke function. They were used on the Maestro and Montego. The really interesting one used a valve to adjust the height of the piston and thus the mixture. The valve was controlled by an ECU that adjusted the vacuum according to the feedback from a lambda sensor - it was a closed loop emission control carburetor. It never made it to production. There was a lot of very advanced technology in the BL/Rover stable. Most of it never saw production and was killed off during development. There were CAN based cars built in the early 1990s and they were building fully electric vehicle prototypes in 1990, 20 years before the Nissan leaf or the Tesla.

The introduction of OBD II has driven this. It now means that the main vehicle control signals have the same message types in the same frames on the same connector on all cars. You no longer need to read the plugs and exhaust colour to know why its running a bit rough.

It's not CAN that's the issue its how VAG chose to architect their electrical system. You can build a modern vehicle without CAN, it's just that the wiring harness would be huge and the the feature content less due to the limited information flow between Ecus (been there, done it). You do need a canalyzer to diagnose the bus when your design and debug a new vehicle architecture. When the system is working the most likely faults are an open circuit wire or a short. CAN is a differential bus and you can diagnose these faults using a voltmeter - it's a standard approach. You won't see the messages and without the appropriate database it won't mean anything. You can buy cheap can interfsces that plug into a USB port and there are free can tools to work with them. My own car has 2 Ecus and no busses. 1 flashes the indicators and the other is the radio. Engine management is courtesy of SU and a Lucas dizzy - still going strong after 37 years!

I don't deal with body electrical so I'm not aware of the lighting regs in detail however the regs tend to run a long way behind what's technically possible and what's being done in some parts of the industry. I was once told by someone senior in a German OEM that you could only send road speed as a hard-wired signal since CAN introduced too many errors. We put a CAN based solution into production 5 months later that met all of the government observed certification tests and was more accurate than the hard wired solution! Reading Peterboat's comments I would suggest that the regs were drafted badly and required a hard wired solution - the writer was thinking of the implementation, not what the desired end result was. When the CHMSL first came in hard wiring was the only solution since the early multiplex systems were very laggy (often UART based or using analogue multiplexing e.g. Salplex system 4000). The world has moved on a lot since then. In many cases the German regs are more up to date that those in the rest of europe and current eu rules allow for a system to be homologated in one country and sold in another. I don't think it's for safety and redundancy - CAN or any bus based system gives you far more fault tolerance / fail safe capabilities than a single wire solution does. The current practice is to use LEDs which don't fail (if designed right) or bulbs driven by smart FETS. All of these would allow fault detection and lamp substitution in a fault condition. A bus failure could be detected by messages not arriving within a pre-determined window or an excessive number of error frames etc. You can't do that with a single wire unless you resort to a multi voltage / current level system and then you're into noise immunity issues.

The delay due to CAN is in the order of ms, a lot faster than it takes a filament to warm up. The reason for the delays in lighting coming on is more likely to be due to anti-bounce in the switch inputs or the ballasts starting up. Software cycle time is unlikely to be an issue since any priority functions would be in fast loops and process in several ms. CAN is fast and is used for many safety critical systems and unlike a hard wired system it is far more diagnosable.

CAN as described above stands for Control Area Network and was invented by Bosch in the 1980s. It runs at a max of 1 Mbps and is widely used however is now being replaced by Flexray. Its used to connect control units together on cars and reduce the wiring bulk. It also significantly improves reliability and reduces weigth by allowing information to be shared between systems on the car. The suitable for CAN bus description is used misleadingly to describe many car electrical parts usually be vendors who have no idea what they're selling but want to sound knowledgable. This LED replacement bulb is suitable for CANbus. What they mean is that its suitable for a vehicle that has bulb failure monitoring. CAN helps simplify the installation of these systems, but you can still hard wire them (common in the 1970s/80s) This works with a CAN bus carPossibly true. Some vehicles only send info like "lights on" or "ignition on" over CAN. If you've got one of these than you need a unit that has a CAN connection to work, otherwise you don't. Be aware there is no standard "dictionary" of what messages and info is sent on CAN - it vary's by manufacturer / model / model year. If you've got a CAN network on the car the cabelling consists of a pair of wires twisted together. It's common on luxary cars from the early 1990s and mass market in the last 10 years. It's now disappearing from luxary vehicles and being replaced with fibre optics (since 2004 / 5) and other networks e.g. Flexray, MOST, LIN, Ethernet etc. I've dealt with CAN when it was in research in 1990 and have worked with it (and its replacements) ever since. It's simple to use and nothing to be afraid of.

I've seen the same with high temperature paint used on lighting equipment. First time its turned on it smokes and smells dreadful but it drops off after a couple of hours and is ok after that. It might be the same.

Accuracy is an issue however it depends what you're using them for. In my case I needed to know it the batteries were charging and if not I needed to do something about it. The SOC wasn't issue since we kept the engine running to maintain load balance. I needed to know if the voltage was above 13.3V (split charge relay closed) and preferably above 14.2. I think on a boat the use would be similar i.e is it charging, are the volts rising with the engine running. You can get away with quite a poor gauge and still get very useful info out of it.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.5015572,-1.4053379,121m/data=!3m1!1e3 52.501460, -1.405652

We used to turn our 40' boat at Hospital bend on the Ashby. We can turn just about anywhere on the Grand Union.

I bought 4 off ebay about a month ago. Used them on a vehicle project at work to monitor the voltages in a pair of battery banks. Great for the price. I used red ones and mounted them in a red transparent plastic box to improve the contrast. Clearly readable in brightish sunlight and a real bargain. I couldn't buy the parts to build one for the price I paid for the 4.

It'll work however:- The TVs is expecting a stable12v When the engine is running you'll see a voltage higher than 14v. Things like pumps, motors etc produce voltage spikes called transients. These are short duration but can be thousands of volts. The effect of these transients will depend on lots of things including what's turned on when they occur and how your wiring has been installed. These probably won't kill the TV straight away but could reduce its life expectancy. Many people have connected a TV directly and have not had a problem. If you were designing this as part of an automotive quality installation you'd have to build in transient, load dump, and reverse battery protection. Personally I'd add some form of regulator but its your choice.

I sprayed ours with pink flourescent paint. It doesn't stop them from chipping, make them visually attractive or protect them in any way, but it does mean that when the kids leave them behind at a lock we can spot them easily. They get re-sprayed about once a year...

It's Schroedingers coal. It's both wet and dry simultaneously, it only determines its state when you open the bag.

The voltage on the Renault is below 60v so it's classified as low voltage. Above 60v you need voltage sensing, leakage sensing and lots of other kit which adds cost.

If you do use poison use one containing something like difenacoum. Unlike warfarin it's persistent in the liver so the mouse can eat small amounts over several weeks and it'll still be fatal. You need to be careful handling it since it can be absorbed through the skin.

It all depends on how the charge circuit / power converter that's built into the battery and how the battery management system is configured.