Topic

Well my name is Simon, and i'm 36 and the new Forum Owner, I live about ten minutes away from Brighton with my wife and two daughters (9 and 1 years old)

I work as an IT Director for a local company, all though i'm still very hands on and spend all day every day dashing all over the south east of England fixing computers. Outside of work i'm still into computers in badly geeky way, and for that matter any thing electronic, If i can drag my self away from my keyboard you'll probably find me working on some crazy project, including robots, automating my house, installing infrared camera in my hedgehog house that sort of thing, Thats of course after i've finshed all the Diy jobs i'm given as well.

On the MG side of things I have a 2001 mgf, which i bought as a cat D write off which i'm repairing (Slowly, two years so far) and slapping on any LE500 bits i can lay my hands on.

My other MGF project i'm currently in the middle off, is what i like to call the missing ECU, Its going to control intermitant/Rain sensitive wipers , Auto head lights and a mems breakout to display some stuff on a LCD screen, I've found some round LCD's which will fit as direct replacments for the clock and oil guages.

Here's a picture of my lastest robot, Hex playing with his fav toy.

Love the robot.... Good to know we have a comp wiz, I might need some help lol

Love hex, I wish I had the time for things like him.

And tonight i say good bye to Hex, Before he jets of to his new home in Denmark

Bye Hex. No 'making bacon' over there.

G'day Simon.
How's the missing ECU going? It sounds great and I'd be interested in fitting that type of mod (had it on the VW and it's great!)
Thanks for any info.
Ken


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Simon did you sort the auto lights n wipers?

Got mine sorted using a Valeo auto head light kit.. And a kit from rain tracker for the wipers..

Thanks Allan.
I looked into those two kits and there's a new Rain Tracker that also can control the lights.
http://www.raintracker.com/
Rain Tracker RT-50A
I found one for $75 US and $50 US postage via eBay so purchased it.
I'll let the group know how it goes when it arrives as it looks to make the separate head light unit redundant. They do comment on the added complexity of fitting the light sensing facility though, so I may get an auto elec to do this if its beyond me. (Or my Marine Engineer mate!)

Thanks again DD..

Ken

I got the rain tracker RT 50A

Bought it in America.. And got my friend to bring it over at Xmas.. $80

The rain tracker seems to get the best reviews..

Everything planned kind off, but then i got side tracked playing my new robot Qbo



My plan for auto wipe and lights and stuff is to use a PC to control it all, this pc will be hooked up to an IO board to read and trigger various parts of the MG loom.

For example the rover stalks with variable wipe have a different resistance measured on each variable step. so the IO board would read this value, pass to the computer which would do the timing and then back to the IO board to trigger a single wipe.

For more tricky stuff i've gone down the route of using BMW parts. This is because BMW have nice way of linking the majority of their electronics together , everything is linked via a serial bus with one 3 core cable running front to back hooking it all up. I've made a usb adaptor which can read and write to the BMW bus.

This sent me down the route of using this for auto wipe

Being a bmw rain sensor, However mounting it lead me deciding to also replace the rear view mirror with a BMW one, This gives me a Autodim mirror plus the light sensor for auto headlights, and a red led for the alarm.
Down side is i loose the map lights, so currently intending to retro fit this into windscreen surround some how



whilst not much done in the car, i've complete a lot of the programming for it until i found my half completed 3D printer in the loft just before xmas, so playing with that currently

Good on you Simon.
Bloody hell! Now if you had of just put all that stuff together in a kit for us mere mortals (not including R2D2) I would have gone that route!
It amazes me how inventive the MG mob are in the UK.

Best wishes mate.

Ken