In case you wanted to know what a PFC looks like inside
 

I recently fixed a commander for a friend of mine, well actually I fixed it this summer but I figured I would share what it looks like for those who are interested. I am going to include pics of the commander and the actual brain box.



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I am also going to put the difference in the OLED and LED commander since I have the pictures handy.

Older LED

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New OLED

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After 7 years of maintaining USAF electronics worth millions of dollars, including old crude water cooled klystrons to 1970s state of the art quad diversity tropo scatter micro wave mobile systems; I am really unimpressed.

Look less impresive than the interiors of my current surround sound system equipment.

Others have posted what the interiors look like long ago.

would love to have that new commander.....

Have the OLED commander. It's just a yellower, brighter version of the same basic circuit board.

Chuck, if I didn't know you better I'd swear you're just making those tech words up. :)

I figures that someone at sometime had posted up pictures. I am an electrical engineer and for the past two years have been designing my own PCBs for various frequency synthesizers and I like to see othe PCB layouts. I was also unimpressed with the design. However it would be easy to repair anything on that board as long as some of the parts are still made.

I have had two LED commanders apart and the design was a little different in each one. Id be courious to see if the newer OLED commander uses the same chips.

^ By not impressed, are you talking about the board layout, chip choices, quality of the build? Or it's just old because they are probably designed/build back in the 90's?

<~ EE here as well :)

I like the black and yellow combo, much easier to see, anyone wanna trade lol

To make the thread more intreresting,if you put a red film on top of the oled screen ,the colour becomes amber same as the dash colour(been there done that)..

E n E guy? I'm definitely a crew chief. Lets start a flightline thread :P

I couldn't tell you anything about circuit boards or pointy-headed, spark-chasing, specker head stuff...but it does as stated look like if anything dies on it it is easily replaced.

It all was paid for by the USAF while I was in West Germany protecting all of you.

None of this makes any difference because we all are going to die on Dec 21!

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

It's a really old design, not to mention relatively low volume.

Maybe not impressed was the wrong choice in words. I don't know why but I expected something more complex I guess. The design is simple and thats a good thing from an engineering standpoint. The parts are spread out pretty well and would be easy to replace which is also good. I just didnt expect it to be simple. I kept thinking stand alone ECU and expected to see something more. I was just surprized I guess of how simple the units were, which is how you want to design things simple, easy to use, reliable design but when it needs to be put together or worked on you want that to be easy as well. I think Apexi accomplished all this, I just had unrealistic expectations I think.

The newest stock ECUs have about 1.5 megabytes of flash memory, just to put things in perspective. They do communicate with a number of other modules though, especially if the engine is direct injected.

Typically, the newest standalones are a good 10 years behind the state-of-the-art in terms of hardware while running comparatively simple software. Most standalone ECUs can barely run electronic throttle, a technology that has been out in mass production for over 15 years.

^ That's usually how it works with most computer system, the system we have at work that over sees the entry power grid of the city and most part of the state was more than 10 years old, due to it being at the end of its life cycle, we had a recent upgrade that cost millions of dollars that bring it to about 7 years out of date LOL.

Standalone ECU should not be that much more complicated than a regular ECU, it functions the same just has programming capability that associate with a user friendly software, which can probably be done with a couple additional chips and the rest are in software.

Look at it this way. The stock FD came out in '92 (in its earliest form). You say standalones are at least 10 years off the current tech.

That means the PFC must be mid to late-80's tech by that logic..?

I'm no fan of the PFC, as I had explained to ArghX, the timing control (ability to retard on knock sensor input) leaves a lot to be desired. The stock ECU can retard timing, and the PFC just flashes a light at you over a preset threshold, and continues to allow knock.

I know I'm picky, and there are not many standalones that have OEM-like timing-retard, even in the most current ones. But its a valid reason to for me to stay away from the Apexi in my stock car.

Hardware wise, it's newer than that. 90s basically. Software wise, yes it's mid 80s. It can run staged sequential injection and has some basic look up tables, simple closed loop control over idle and boost control. Like any standalone, it has almost zero self-diagnostics and almost zero failsafes. That just comes with the territory. Even the FD stock ECU was pretty bad.

On a new generation turbocharged vehicle, you can basically unplug most of the sensors and put 87 octane in there and it won't leave you stranded or have permanent engine damage.

[quote]I'm no fan of the PFC, as I had explained to ArghX, the timing control (ability to retard on knock sensor input) leaves a lot to be desired. The stock ECU can retard timing, and the PFC just flashes a light at you over a preset threshold, and continues to allow knock.

You can have the best hardware and software in the world, but the calibration has to be good. If you have say an STi (hardly state-of-the art) you can rely on the stock knock control or make some tweaks to it based on your setup. That's because most of the work was done by a bunch of guys on engine dynos. You're building off someone else's work, just like the guys at Mazda tuning whatever new rotary engine they have is building off hardware, software, and calibration that somebody else did in the past.

Building knock control from scratch using a standalone is tricky in the sense that you have to do it on the road or a chassis dyno. It's going to be either too sensitive (sometimes pulling timing when not really necessary) or not sensitive enough (sometimes not pulling enough timing when needed). There's only so much you can do on your own...

TWT and Kylstrons used for micro wave amplification and transmission.
1960 - 1970s USAF mobile equipment was in the 1 - 3 Kw range.

What no Nu-Vistors and tunnel diodes !

BTW: want to tune-up my PRC-47 . . .

:-) neil

WoW, didn't know electronics looked like that!