Reducing automotive fuel consumption with an Arduino
Every car sold over the past few decades has been equipped with an engine control unit, or ECU for short. Its job is to control nearly every aspect of vehicle performance by reading various sensors and acting on those inputs accordingly. However, some older cars aren't as efficient as they could be, which is why YouTuber Robot Cantina wanted to modify their 1997 Saturn Coupe for better fuel efficiency.
To achieve this goal, Robot Cantina has created a lean burn system that works by tricking the ECU into believing that the engine is burning more fuel than the actual amount, thereby reducing fuel consumption. They took a cheap air/fuel mixture sensor and connected its input to the engine manifold. Due to the way it outputs a wideband linear voltage, the signal had to be converted with an Arduino Uno to a narrow, lower voltage range via a lookup table.
The detection of an idle or low combustion state is carried out using a potentiometer and an air pressure sensor. The potentiometer allows the driver to dial in a specific offset to set when lean burn should begin, and another is used to alter the amount of fuel introduced in this state. Finally, a digital-to-analog converter takes the resulting quantized fuel level and sends it to the ECU.
Although the goal of the project was to improve energy efficiency, the end result was actually the opposite, much to the dismay of Robot Cantina. You can watch their full video below for more information on how the lean burn system was built.
Every car sold over the past few decades has been equipped with an engine control unit, or ECU for short. Its job is to control nearly every aspect of vehicle performance by reading various sensors and acting on those inputs accordingly. However, some older cars aren't as efficient as they could be, which is why YouTuber Robot Cantina wanted to modify their 1997 Saturn Coupe for better fuel efficiency.
To achieve this goal, Robot Cantina has created a lean burn system that works by tricking the ECU into believing that the engine is burning more fuel than the actual amount, thereby reducing fuel consumption. They took a cheap air/fuel mixture sensor and connected its input to the engine manifold. Due to the way it outputs a wideband linear voltage, the signal had to be converted with an Arduino Uno to a narrow, lower voltage range via a lookup table.
The detection of an idle or low combustion state is carried out using a potentiometer and an air pressure sensor. The potentiometer allows the driver to dial in a specific offset to set when lean burn should begin, and another is used to alter the amount of fuel introduced in this state. Finally, a digital-to-analog converter takes the resulting quantized fuel level and sends it to the ECU.
Although the goal of the project was to improve energy efficiency, the end result was actually the opposite, much to the dismay of Robot Cantina. You can watch their full video below for more information on how the lean burn system was built.
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