This group of blogs is about a system I developed for my Dads car (see below).
Those who build ICV's (like those at OzClubbies) will appreciate that taking an engine from a donor car and getting it to work in your back yard project is getting more an more difficult as the electronics become increasingly complex.
The ICV built by my father (Ian Rusch) used a 2005 Australian delivered Ford Focus 2.0L 'Duratec' engine. When wiring up the system we wanted to retain the minimum amount of electronics from the original car. For ADR compliance the original engine control ECU had to be retained, and obviously all of the engine sensors.
In the past it would have been easy to separate out the engine control to run stand-alone, but not in this case. The dashboard (gauge cluster) plays a fairly major role in the focus system, for our purposes the main function causing issues was the security system.
-One option to take (which others have) is to just retain the original dashboard in the new car. There are a number of reasons why we didn't want to do this. 1. The dash didn't suit the look of the car, aftermarket gauges matched much better. 2. The dash would complain non stop about a myriad of things that were 'wrong' with the car, such as doors being open, power steering faults, ABS faults etc. It is possible to trick the dash into thinking that all of the required systems are still there (by sending faked CAN Bus messages), but that is a bit of a band aid approach.
For all the reasons above I was tasked with creating a system to allow the engine to start and run using only the Engine ECU (bypass security) and to drive the aftermarket gauges and cooling fan.
In the next blogs I will describe the system I came up with and what I found out about the security system (Fords 'PATS' system - Passive Anti Theft System)
