While having a few drinks with a buddy of mine at a local bar in San Francisco I met an editor for Jalopnik, a sister site for gawker.com. After talking to him for a while I mentioned my open source fuel injected 1973 BMW 2002 sitting out on the street. Next thing I know he is taking pictures of the car and taking down my info. A few days later some friends who read the site me this link featuring my car.

After months of planning, documenting, and gathering parts the project is finally complete (almost). I still have to ditch the distributor for a crank fired ignition system but this’ll do for now. As always, more details and exact plans can be found on the wiki

After 5 days of working on the fuel injection I am finally almost complete. Fortunately my friend let me use his garage for week which has been extremely helpful. I also had the help of my roommate. Right now are are stuck because my computer cannot get a signal from the coil telling it to fire. I have to do some more research but I am sure it will work.

In the spirit of being open source, I have decided to convert my little BMW to Electronic Fuel Injection (EFI). What prompted this decision was a road trip to Chico when my car didnt perform as well due to the environment, i.e. the altitude. This is due the carburetor, a great invention that works incredibly well to this day, but for me, it wasnt enough. I liked the idea of being able to tune my car with a computer. Even while I’m driving! It sure beats taking the carbs apart over and over to change the jets ;). As always, I will be managing the project and researching on my wiki.

The MegaSquirt system was built by a bunch of Assembler engineers who realized that there was a place for open source in this industry. If I were to do the same via some of the closed source manufacturers I would be paying thousands with very limited resources. This is exactly how I view software in my day job. I am 100% open source in all of my environments. Now my car is the same. More info on this project can be found on the MegaSquirt website.