For the past five months I've been working on a background tachometer project for this engine. It's been one of the most frustrating projects I've been involved with because it has required so much time dealing with questionable documentation and flaky vendors.
The project began when I purchased a really cool miniature (1-1/4" square) aircraft tach in 'unknown condition' through eBay from someone in Bulgaria. I was hoping to make it the center piece of the control console I'm now designing for this engine. 'Unknown condition' on eBay usually means 'run away fast', but the meter's face looked OK in the photo so I decided to go for it. It wasn't very expensive, and I actually ended up paying less for it than the shipping charges to get it here.
I've modified d'Arsonval meters in the past to alter their functionality for special applications, and so I only needed a working movement. The attraction of this particular one was that it was the right size, and I wasn't going to have to make a new face for it. When I received it there was no electronics - just a meter with four terminals in a four inch long housing where the original electronics had probably been located. I shortened the housing to the actual depth of the meter, which was about one inch, since I planned to add my own circuitry off to the sides instead of to its rear.
Some ohmmeter checks showed the meter probably contained a pair of coils which was puzzling enough, but I also found the meter was relatively unresponsive to dc current. After some web research I learned the meter was an air core movement, something totally new to me, and required complex quadrature signals instead of dc current to drive it. My guess is that my 'unknown condition' meter had been cannibalized for its more valuable electronics. After some more investigation I discovered there have been special purpose ICs manufactured to generate the needed signals to drive such meters since they were commonly found on automotive dashboards for many years. The current move seems to be toward stepper motor based-movements. A review of several on-line data sheets and an exhaustive Web search revealed the DIP version of the one that I probably needed (CS8190EN16) had been long discontinued and no longer available from common US distributors. However, a guy in Hong Kong claimed to have ten of them for sale on eBay. I ordered five parts at a good price from him hoping to get at least one that worked.
With help from the data sheet/application note I soon developed a schematic. The IC requires its own 12 Vdc source, and since I plan to run my engine from a single 6V lead acid battery I had to include a small dc/dc converter module in my design. Actually getting one of these converters in my hands grew into its own months' long saga created by several vendors who continually lied about having access to them. After finally receiving one, though, I breadboard it separately from the meter circuitry so I would have more flexibility later on with the final packaging.
I made up a Hall-triggered test board to drive the meter circuitry as well as a nine magnet trigger disk that I could spin with a drill or mill spindle to test and calibrate the tach. This test circuitry duplicated the trigger circuitry I would be interfacing to in my already completed ignition modules so I wouldn't have to involve and possibly damage them in my early breadboarding attempts.
It was a good thing I had included a socket on the breadboard for the driver IC because after receiving them from Hong Kong I found that not a single one worked. Each presented different symptoms telling me I had probably purchased poorly QC'd counterfeit parts or else floor sweepings from someone who had worked at the original fab plant.
The discontinued part was available from several other Chinese direct suppliers, including some others also advertising on eBay. I decided to try once more with a different vendor. A month later when five more parts from the second vendor showed up, I found these ones almost worked. When powered up, the meter zero'd as it was supposed to, but all five of the IC's were totally unresponsive to any trigger input. I had troubleshooting access to a portion of the internals of the ICs through two key pins, and it seemed that all five parts suffered from the same internal defect. An internal block of circuitry known as a current mirror that connects the input signal conditioner to the F/V converter did not seem to be functional. This was really suspicious, and the real frustrating part was that the section of the data sheet that explained the operation of this portion of the circuitry and its effect on the selection of several external components that I had to add contained so many errors and ambiguous statements that I didn't trust it. I just couldn't be certain whether the problem with these ICs lay with me, the data sheet, or all the parts I had purchased.
I considered trying to breadboard the surface mount part because it is still in current production and available from reputable distributors, but I felt that with all the uncertainty over the past several months I needed to stick with a socketed part. After many false leads and lots of phone calls I eventually located a small Canadian automotive parts supplier who had been stuck with a batch of the DIP parts after dashboard designers quit using them in new designs. After being assured they were truly in stock in North America, I ordered another five parts and paid a healthy small quantity premium to get them.
While waiting on the third batch of IC's, I machined a housing for the meter; and I made a new breadboard designed to fit around the meter inside the housing. I also developed a new schematic using the functional meter driver portion of the last batch of ICs along with my own front-end circuitry just in case the third batch of parts didn't work either.
Since they had no experience in dealing with small orders to individuals, this last vendor made a paperwork error that triggered a customs and security snafu that ended up delaying delivery of the parts for nearly a month. Despite what I had been promised, the parcel had actually been shipped from India instead of Canada.
When I finally received them, and with very low expectations, I tested each one in my original breadboard. To my amazement and after nearly five months of frustration, I was finally rewarded with a rational movement of the tach's needle in response to my test generator. While wiping tears away I packaged my new circuit board and meter movement inside the enclosure I had made. I hauled the tach, battery, and test driver circuitry over to my mill spindle where I was finally able to run and calibrate the tach. As a final step I re-tested the tach with it connected to one of my ignition modules while actually firing a spark gap. I'm pretty sure I've never experienced a better example of Murphy's Law than I have with this 'little' side project. - Terry