1993 Accord LX

The old car is back. I finally got it all back together and in road worthy shape. To do it myself turned out to be quite an adventure. I have to admit at one point I had it towed to a place that could deal with a very dysfunctional ball-joint. But other then that "minor" deviation, I completed about $2500 worth or repair work for about 1/5 that amount, and the car rides and runs great. The VID device is now laying loose on the passenger side rug... it reports a nice 34 MPG average during my drives. Apparently the GD front driver side brake rotor has been completely dysfunctional for a long time. While working on the other issues, I think it was pushed into to complete failure.. I finally had to replace everything on the driver's side wheel assembly, except the steering knuckle itself. But that turned out to be very inexpensive---thanks to ebay etc. Along the way,, i also replaced the front coil springs, and the entire exhaust system south of the catalysis converter. At any rate, the only thing remaining on my list--- for long term stability is the timing belt.. I believe with the amount of information I have on this subject, and the tools I have.. it would be feasible to do the job myself. I am however, worried that unforeseen problems might prevent me from getting to the core of the issue. For instance, the engine mount on that side must be removed.. and it is a bear...

Update

If anyone requests information on the original design of the VID, I would be happy to assist them. However, I have sent this over all design back to be repacked. The current VID software and hardware supports most pre-1996 fuel injected automobiles--the functionality of the fuel economy hardware and algorithms are solid. The problems lies in the device mounting and packaging. In my case, the 1993 Honda Accord has a dash mounted clock. I recently removed this item (it was not working).. and realized that building the clock function into the VID and then installing it in the existing clock (footprint--if you will) might be a good way to finally get some use from the device. I have started to select a I2C based Real time clock chip to provide this feature. Now---that I have a I2C bus--- i am adding temperature sensors for both inside and outside the cab.. I am also adding analog monitoring capacity for other things. i.e. battery voltage measurement etc.

Bottom line.. (in case anyone is reading) the VID is going to be redesigned to work with multiple cpus. It will also be configured to run at 20 MHZ (not 8 MHZ) The clock chip will provide the main processor a reliable source of 32.768 KHZ---This means that fuel measurement system accuracy will no longer depend on the cpu's instruction clock and the timer divider, currently used to achieve 125 microsecond measurement granularity. The other feature needed was the addition of non-volatile static ram. The clock chip will provide about 56 bytes of static ram This storage will replace the flash storage currently used. One of the issued uncovered during long term testing was that flash can wear out-- since a some sort of non-switched power will be required for the clock--- it will also keep TRIP and TANK data alive.