Electronics/Computer Experts....Is this possible???
 

Bearing in mind the ECU of the Cosworth receives information from the various sensors, is it not possible to plug in a laptop, using some kind of software to read the signals???

Like the SECS monitor but on a laptop instead, just to check various settings?

Any idea's???

if you could swite a program to interperet the data coming from the ecu, cos by default the ecu doesnt output this info, only pectel board (ot othrer) equipted ecus can do this and again interpereting the data and getting it into a front end would be a big big job, this is exactly what the new SECS monitor does (i hope ;)) and i will be buying one when they come out :)

If you know what each pin is connected to, etc... you could get an analogue capture unit plugged into a usb port and wire the unit up to the ecu pins (prob best make up a loom using male and female ecu connectors).
Then it would be easy enough to write a program to scan the inputs and display the results on screen.

Only thing is - those boards are pretty much the same price (if not more) than simon's monitors anyway, and you have to wait for laptop to startup, shutdown, prob will crash a few times, install it somewhere in the car, etc... I'd call simon me...

you just need a digital to analogue converter, as frog says running from the usb port or old style rs232 on a com port.

you can get a 4 channel 8 bit a/d converter pretty cheaply, certainly less than 100 quid.

i was planning to do this, but in a slightly different way. i was going to get a microcontroller that has 8 channel a/d on board and drives an lcd display. i would then program it to interpret the various 0-5V signals that you get from the sensors like ACT, TPS, boost etc and scale them to read on the display, maybe even with a bar graph or whatever. you could scroll through them with buttons, or auto scroll, have warnings, peak holds etc. wouldn't be too difficult, would just take a while to program it. that is basically what a SECS monitor is anyway.

i could've done that for way less than 200 euro's, which is pretty good. but then i thought about and decided not to bother as i will be going for the SECS S8 ECU soon, and that communicates with a laptop or pda thru rs232 anyway and sends all of those values. the mapping software will display them for you anyway, or you could just use other software to display/log/chart them.