Gutting an ignitor and upgrading to BIP373
 

Has anyone does this yet? A friend's igniter died and we are looking to getting it back on track within the weekend, rather than finding a used igniter from a junkyard. No, he doesn't want to upgrade to COPS, and even if he did, we want to have the car ready before Monday (daily driver).

Can't imagine why it wouldn't work. It's 5v triggered active-high, and has more than enough current capacity.

You'd need to jimmy something up if you wanted to keep the tachometer working in the instrument cluster, but that's about the only issue I see.

A couple of diodes will solve the tacho problem, I was just looking for a quick solution to save my weekend Vs figuring it out from scratch (and the wife hating me for yet another project).

It should work fine. It's probably even an upgrade from the 1.6 ignitor.
I sometimes ground the BIPs through a spare pin directly to the motor instead of through the ground plane inside the board. It makes me feel good, but it's not really necessary.

I used two in a build once that utilized neon coils without ignitors...

Any instructions?

1: Connect ignition trigger wires to BIP inputs.
2: Connect coil - wires to BIP load pins.
3: Connect BIP ground pins to ground.
4: ???
5: Profit.

Nah that's too easy, it can't be for real.

How'd you get on Reverant?

And do you have a circuit diagram for the tacho?

I still haven't done it, as soon as I do and it's a success I'll let you know.

What the igniter looks like inside. By the looks of it, I think it holds a grudge against me for using an HF-quality dremmel tool.


Attachment 192048

Proceeding to gut it.

Remove R57. Jump R43.

Use a 270-330ohm resistor from the CPU (Squirt-1 or Accel-1) to IgbtIN.

Now just duplicate that BIP circuit for the second pair.

Igniter gutted.

Attachment 192046

And upgraded!

Attachment 192045

that's some pretty lead heatsinking.

Yup. The tab is also acting as the collector, so I chopped of the middle leg and that got me there faster and neater.

Very clever.
Are the 2 diodes for tach pulse?

Yes, here's to hoping that it will work.

Awesome work Reverant, stealth upgrades!

Partial success, it runs for a minute at first and then dies. The igniter gets hot, which suggests that the thermal protection kicks in. I'm using "Going low" for the spark output, this is an MSPNP9093 upgraded to MS-II. When using Going high (inverted), it doesn't want to run at all, I keep cranking for 4-5 seconds, it almosts catches for half a second, and then goes back to plain cranking.

The tacho doesn't work at all.