Ed Poore

Whilst I agree with you @Nonimouse none of this factors in the Mike factor...

I've taken an L322 on rougher stuff than that track with 19" wheels, what @Naks says is very true about how you'd drive with or without terrain response. It look me a little while to get used to it when I had the L322 but once you did it was a doddle to drive compared to a vehicle without it. To be honest in general I really wasn't that impressed with their driving technique either. Their comments on articulation were interesting as well - the Bronco doesn't look like it's got anywhere near the articulation that the L322 does even with the "sway" bars disconnected, the Jeep looks similar or slightly more. Okay it's not a current model but personally if I wanted something like that I'd be very hard pushed to take a new Defender over an L322 but that's my personal choice (mainly because of the option of having a V8). I have no idea on how good the L405 would be because I don't like the shape of it so have no interest in it. Even on the TDV8 models you can get an 18" wheel to fit (albeit after market from Compmotive because they made an alloy for the Nemesis that could take 18" tyres but still clear the massive Brembo calipers). Keeping to standard size tyres you can now get decent all terrain tyres in 18 and 19". If you're willing to go up a slight bit on profile (e.g. from a 50 to 55 profile) then you can get all terrain tyres for 20".

I quite like that!

@Jon W has just taken delivery of a new D Max for work (about a week ago?) so may be able to offer some insight into living with one.

Simple answer - no one would be willing to fund the development so given we'd have to source at least one or two donor vehicles means it's a back-burner kind of project. Electronically it's reasonably simple to design but actually getting it reliable will simply take a lot of time and I for one have other work on the go both higher priority and paying (that's definitely higher priority) so whist I'd love to I just simply can't devote the time at the moment.

There's a time and a place for optimisation trust me. Usually right at the end when you've got things working reliably and want to improve performance / efficiency / space. You shouldn't need to optimise just to get the thing running. I had a look through the code and they had (at least when I looked) had a load of assembly mixed in with the C. So what started out as a nice potentially cross platform bit of code quickly got shot down. In one of my past projects there we were heavily looking into optimisations both on a micro level but also in my instance on a 72 core 256GB RAM monster with 64MB (I think) cache. There was only ever once that I managed to beat the compiler at optimising a bit of code and that was because I knew the incoming data structure so could swap a few things around to keep it in cache more often. Usually what the optimisation does is make the code unintelligible for anyone but the original author unless it's done well. In a commercial environment that's a big drain and usually not required. I don't have against it but requiring optimisation to make it meet timing requirements to make it run screams to be you've messed up the design big time.

And there in lies my real bug bear with things like Megasquirt etc., yes I appreciate it was started decades ago and people struggled with soldering anything smaller than a battery cable but technology has moved on so far since those days. I had high hopes of the Speeduino project but the moment I saw the fact that they had "highly optimised the code to run on an Arduino" immediately meant to me they'd chosen the wrong micro in the first instance. My inclination for a rpelacement Megasquirt / Dieselsquirt whatever you want to call it would be scrap the micro, put a tiny little ARM core in there as a supervisor and a small little FPGA. V6, V8, V10, V16, W16 who cares that's what FPGAs are superb at doing multiple things in parallel. Again <10us resolution is perfectly doable chosing the right components. I guess my background is in timing things down in the picosecond range and having to process things in nanoseconds so when you've got microseconds to achieve something you can do soooo much in that time . Plus you don't really have to react to something in an engine - it's all fairly predictive (yes you do need to adapt to things but that's in slow time - hence the ARM). Generating a 120V rail that can withstand inductive loads is tricky but not difficult. Generating a 500kW 1.2kV DC rail from 3-phase whilst retaining a 0.99 power factor and >98% efficiency more or less irrespective of loading, now that's a challenge but achievable. Like you I too am very tempted to give it a go just for curiosity. I've got a bunch of systems in my desk that are more than capable of handling the timing / complexity requirements, once it's developed could easily be shrunk down on device size to reduce cost. I mean you don't need a quad core 1.2GHz SoC to run an engine but it'll be handy to develop on . Just need to find someone to donate us a 4.2 Supercharged and a TDV8 that we are allowed to dismantle / blow up.

If I remember correctly all you need to do is "send" a pulse of current to inject fuel so not massively difficult... All you've got to do is send roughly the right amount of diesel at roughly the right time - you don't even need to faff with this whole lighting it at the right time either . I mean fundamentally a diesel is a diesel - it needs fuel and air (okay and maybe a bit of compression). The high pressure fuel rail takes care of itself if I remember correctly, so crank the engine and start squirting fuel with respect to cam shaft and crank shaft positions and away you go. Admittedly the voltages and currents are a wee bit higher but I mean that might bump up the cost to a few pence for a suitable MOSFET...

I did actually look into it and there's no way I'd start from an existing ECU. I did look into it a while back when I had the 3.6 and actually controlling the sensors and everything else looked fairly simple and straightforward starting from scratch. What I didn't know was how to tune / map the vehicle so if there's someone who knows that I can build an ECU to control it.

Is that £12-15k per vehicle or was that factoring in development costs? If the former that's frankly ridiculous! I'm sure @FridgeFreezer and I could knock together some custom ECUs for less than that to run the engine outside of the vehicle for a fraction of that.

If the drop box doesn't foul anything why not just bolt the pump to the output as a cheap method. Hoses will add up quickly but I know someone who might trade you some fibreglass work for free hoses / scrounging. Probably also has a suitable tank lying around knowing him.

Speed will be governed by flow, pressure will dictate the pulling power available. Both those combined will give total HP required. If Mike already has the pto adapter plate from the winch then mounting a hydraulic pump on the back should be fairly straightforward. My PTO pump in 4th on idle has more than enough flow to run my 16.5m cherry picker and that has some fairly hefty rams on it.

Goodyear

That particular one was a piece of rock in the lake district which also damaged the rear on the same side. Replaced them with another set of General Grabber ATs as they were the only "all terrain" available for that size. Lost another one to a small stick going through the sidewall. About 8k after fitting a set I was servicing the L322 and noticed the inside of the sidewall was simply perishing and cracking up. Everyone ranted and raved about them on Range Rovers and I've been less than impressed. By comparison the Duratracs were phenomenal.

Actually that was a General Grabber and I was less than impressed, no tyre managed more than 15k. Plenty of tread but sidewalls perished. Replaced them with Goodyear Wrangler Duratracs and they were orders of magnitude better.