You are right about that one. This is going to be a big one!

The thing is that this will combine two parts of my life that I really like to do: racing and car development with the control systems! I am guessing that at least a winter will be required for something like that (still greatly depending on the amount of time one can dedicate to something like this).

As of the compatibility of the sensors are everything else, the goal is to reuse as much as I already have in order to minimize the expenses. Still, performances are the priority! The control system will be something built from the scratch (so no stock AYC/ACD ECU). Well, not really from the scratch, rather use one of the proven controller chips, with proven RTOS and adjust all of the signals for this combination. Well, this is kind of defining phase and just from this thread I gained a lot of useful information. We will see!

EVO 7 has a fancy ABS system and I am not going to try to match that one. For the type of racing that I do, current system seem to be OK. So as long as the car still stops when needed, I will not be touching that part. Although, there is a very similar one in the RX7-TT made by the same company and it works damn nice!

Mr. AWD

 

Have you considered active suspension? I was speaking with a technician from GEMS who was explaining how electronically controlled valves are used to regulate the suspension actively. He implied that this field looked the most promising for future development and was being strenuously pursued in rallying.

 

I did some research in this field as well. What I was able to find so far are three ways to control the shocks. One is with electronically controlled valves (as you mentioned).

Other one is with electronically controlled fluid (basically you change viscosity of the oil with the small current). Typical one seen so far is a magnetic fluid that is controlled with a current and coupled with the speed/positioning sensor, it would give you very nice logs of what suspension is doing.

The third one is with DC motors instead of the spring/shock combo. You can regulate where you want to be height wise and how quickly you can move from that height and back. The response graph looks very similar between the DC motor and the shock/spring combo and it can be used here for this too. A while back Lotus Elan II had some kind of suspension that was based on the DC motors.

This idea sounds very promising (either way you go), and I am sure that will be used much more in the near future.

Mr. AWD