I was bored at lunch and listened to an audio blog on the topic of fuel efficiency. Today's conversation was with Robert Krupa, a former GM employee who has invented the Firestorm Spark Plug, which burns all of the fuel in the combustion chamber. He clued me to ways to change the parameters in a car's computer to modify the way the engine runs. Of particular interest is fuel mixture. The same 12 pin plug where you plug in the scanner to read the diagnostic codes has a mode called the ALDL, or Assembly Line Diagnostic Link. From here you can connect a laptop at 8192 bits per second using a box to adjust the voltage to work with a typical UART (computer serial port) and PC com software. It is a pure ASCII interface. Apparently, you can connect a laptop to this interface and sample all the available parameters being read by the computer's sensors. You can even ask it to dump a copy of the programming in the computer's storage (EEPROM) to your laptop hard drive. There is work underway to create open source software for these car computers (ECUs). Higher gas prices and inefficient vehicles are causing a lot of online interest in tinkering with the settings. Most of these ECUs are coded to a fuel mixture of 14.7 to 1 air to fuel ratio. This is chosen to reduce emissions, not provide fuel economy. According to Mr. Krupa, there is another sweet spot in low emissions and fuel burning efficiency at 30 to 1. That's double the fuel economy. This may be a better answer to fuel efficiency than feeding hydroxy gas into the air intake.
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