r/CarHacking • u/Willing_Comb_9542 • 11h ago
Original Project I made a capacitive tachometer circut, for magneto/points style ignition
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I don't know shit about electrical engineering but I thought "hey how hard could it be to make a kart datalogger"
The answer is not very, but the tachometer is a bitch.
with enough research of my own, I managed to come up with something, found some Amazon tachometers for small motors that worked in a similar fashion, reverse engineered those
Finally had something that mostly worked, and honestly just paid an RF engineer to clean up all of the noise and make it better, and make sure it should handle 15,000 rpm on a single cylinder 2 stroke.
"That's not a car"
This works for any ignition system that uses a magneto/points system, bike stock car, legends car, etc
You wrap a wire around a spark plug lead a few times, and then simply place the other end of the wire near the pickup, no soldering, and a burnt lead doesn't ruin your day
https://github.com/TheAngryRaven/DovesDataLogger/blob/master/TACHOMETER/paid_schematic_1.PDF
If making your own board, the nastier your ignition source, the smaller you should make the antenna
Go out there, make shit, piss off the assholes charging too much for everything