MPG Gauge on EEC IV
- Thread starter jrubin
- Start date
mikestang63
SN Certified Technician
If you care about MPG on a Mustang, you own the wrong car. lol
Your car has an MPG guage. It is the trip odometer. Fill up the tank and then when you go to refill divide the miles driven by the gallons used. Pretty darn accurate if you ask me.
Your car has an MPG guage. It is the trip odometer. Fill up the tank and then when you go to refill divide the miles driven by the gallons used. Pretty darn accurate if you ask me.
f8tlfiveo
My wife likes my spool and blow-off valve.
I know with my tuning hardware, quarterhorse and binary editor software this is one of the things you can datalog on a laptop but not sure how the calculation of mpg is devised. Might be binary editor doing the calculation, might not be.. Not sure if it is possible to have mpg on a digital readout without the laptop. You might want to go to eectuning.org and ask this question on there. There are alot of smart electronic minded people on that site. Hope this helps.
OBD 2 really advanced the computer system. Newer car ecm's can do things the EEC IV just did not have the cpu power to do. Remember Windows 95? We are talking about the same time frame and level of tecnical development. I do not know if a trip computer could be retrofit from another model, but I like the idea. If you do not like the first smart alec answer that may be the most accurate, go old school. JC Whitney probably still sells the vac gauge that is calibrated for mpg. If you find a computer answer, please post it though.
gearheadboy
15 Year Member
Exactly. Most BS factory fuel mileage gauges are simply a vacuum gauge with a crafty face or digital readout. Kinda like installing a vacuum gauge, tracking the normal mileage under easy driving and marking the average gauge position and then again under mostly WOT or aggressive driving. So then you have a good and bad and with knowing the actual fuel mileage you can mark it with numbers. Its all a head game. So my advice is to simply do the math each time you fill up, and keep your foot out of it to achieve the best possible mileage.
The main issue is that you would have to calculate fuel flow based on airflow and driveshaft revs. Many 5.0 Mustangs flow different amounts of fuel, and the tire and gear sizes are often very different from car to car. This complicates the MPG calculations because of all the possible variations and combinations.
The 8061 CPU chip in the 86-93 5.0 Mustangs ECC-IV was a product of the mid 80's Intel technology .This technology gave us the original 8086, the first microprocessor to popularize PC's and personal computing. As result of it's age, speed and limited processing power, adding the compute capability to calculate MPG would probably more than it could accommodate. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8061 for more information on the 8061 CPU chip.
The 8061 CPU chip in the 86-93 5.0 Mustangs ECC-IV was a product of the mid 80's Intel technology .This technology gave us the original 8086, the first microprocessor to popularize PC's and personal computing. As result of it's age, speed and limited processing power, adding the compute capability to calculate MPG would probably more than it could accommodate. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8061 for more information on the 8061 CPU chip.
An 80xx processor? I almost typed Windows 3.1the first time and would have been closer.
OBD II calculates what you need, too bad there is no easy retrofit. I've seen cool plug into the diagnostic port dash displays that will give you too much information, including MPG.
OBD II calculates what you need, too bad there is no easy retrofit. I've seen cool plug into the diagnostic port dash displays that will give you too much information, including MPG.
ratio411
Founding Member
Best way would be a vacuum gauge.
You can find them calibrated with green, yellow, and red markings, so when you drive, you just shoot for keeping it in the green, and you get the best mileage possible that way.
You can find them calibrated with green, yellow, and red markings, so when you drive, you just shoot for keeping it in the green, and you get the best mileage possible that way.
65ShelbyClone
Founding Member
Closer, but still 10 years too recent. DOS 2.0 and Ford's first EEC-IV were both new-for-'83 and Ford's EEC was probably in development for at least a year or two prior to that. If you want to see how archaic the first-gen EEC-IV is inside, I have one I can take a photo of. I might anyway. It's amazing what they could do with that old stuff, though. Actually, it's amazing how little computing power is necessary to run an engine.
OBD-II doesn't calculate anything, it is a monitoring and reporting standard for diagnostics. Manufacturers are free to do whatever they want with the ECU hardware as long as it spits out data compliant with the OBD-II standard. Fortunately for us, manufacturers usually make a lot of other things accessible via the OBD-II port like sensor readings and the ECU's flash memory.
I think the old EEC-IVs probably do have enough performance to output rudimentary MPG data based on vehicle speed and injector pulsewidth. Even if it doesn't, it's already capable of outputting the data necessary for a secondary device to do it. The problem is not having wideband O2 feedback for more accurate calculations.
Off topic, but the space shuttles were cir. 1981 too. How did they ever get to and from orbit with that era of chip? How did we ever get to the moon and back even earlier when this phone would have been sci fi?
Anyway, saw a vintage vac/ economy gauge on ebay this week. It had two scales, one for vac, and the other color coded for economy. I do not think my car EVER makes the economy range on the scale. Not even on a big hill with a tail wind.
Anyway, saw a vintage vac/ economy gauge on ebay this week. It had two scales, one for vac, and the other color coded for economy. I do not think my car EVER makes the economy range on the scale. Not even on a big hill with a tail wind.
Here you go,....Apollo 11 Guidance computer......
64kb of memory, operated at .043 MHZ.
When they said these guys flew to the moon,...they actually "flew" it to the moon.
Just do what every other Fox Mustang owner does.
Claim it gets 30MPG, running 87 octane and running 11's.
Claim it gets 30MPG, running 87 octane and running 11's.
I stumbled across an article a few years ago about using a lincoln mark 7 tripmeter. hooking it up was the easy part. making it look right was nearly impossible.
65ShelbyClone
Founding Member
?
How did we get astronauts to the moon and back 13 years earlier when microchips were still sci-fi and computers took up an entire room? Answer: it takes a lot less computing power to do tasks like put a man on the moon than to render the graphics for Portal 2.
I actually have some ceramic UV EEPROMS that date back to the late '70s. I have others that date progressively later until the flash era made them obsolete. The only thing that separates them is die size.
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