stalling, throttle (gas) cuts out and then restarts

That has mostly gone now, all that was going the fail has failed.

Yes capacitors do loose capacity well electrolytic ones do after some years in operation. We've got some test equipment around and that sort of gear has a very long lifetime but we've found that replacing all the power supply caps has in a lot of cases reduced the ripple and noise of the power supplies.

Some old transistor audio amps the QUAD 303 is a typical one can well do with upgrade cap kits and give such otherwise well built equipment a new lease of life.

A lot of ECU problems are dry joints and poor soldering or soldered joints coming undone after some years in use..

Sorry, but I disagree strongly with that.

I spend far more time fixing computers than cars these days, and still regularly see motherboard and PSU failure due to blown caps.

Bear in mind the production period of the faulty caps was from around '99 up to '04; there are plenty of 10 year-old electronic devices around that therefore have the potential for that type of failure.

Chris

Chris Whelan wrote on 20/08/2012 :

Electrolytic failure is still a major cause of failure.

Ummm, yes they are!

Compared to what?

They are certainly no more complex in terms of component count and density than something like a television, and probably less so than something like a laptop.

Chris

Seconded. Capacitor plague is still commonplace.

Well perhaps we see that differently. We used to see quite a few motherboards thru here and another workshop where the electro's had regularly "popped" their cans or swelled up etc.

But have not seen that for a rather long time now, some years in fact. I think that the ones were they nicked the formula and left out a chemical component were the ones that weren't going to last that long anyway...

And have never seen the same in most other gear with the exception of power units in PVR's and satellite receivers where those components are usually underrated anyway for the application usually only 85 deg C devices in use ..

In article , Harry Bloomfield scribeth thus

Can you be a bit more specific on that Harry?..

Certain models of Canon camcorders were afflicted.

Sadly, I had one...

Chris

It happens that tony sayer formulated :

There was a world wide epidemic of faulty manufactured capacitors several years ago, but electrolytic capacitors remain a major point of failure. Almost every single fault I have had to repair in the past few years amongst my own equipment, has been due to failed electrolytic capacitors. The only exceptions have been a fancy battery charger where the output transistor failed due to short circuiting the output and a Lidl damp meter I got around to repairing last week, which had a dry solder joint.

I currently have a PC which fails to boot when cold, I have yet to trace this issue, but it sounds like a failing cap.

I was looking at an ECU from an overall complexity point of view.

The firmware plus the hardware added together makes them a tremendously complex beast when compared to what was available in the 1960's. On the face of them, they don't have many components, but some of the components themselves are extremely complex.

I meet many more drivers travelling or at least making use of the wrong side of the road now, than I ever did in the 60's.

Oh, FFS. ECU's are a crappy commodity microcontroller, some cheapo I/O, a bit of glue logic and some memory. They run a dead simple "O/S" which runs a tight loop doing lookups. Yes, making the maps is tiresome, but it's very far from rocket science. Why they cost more than £25 is a mystery, especially given that they are made in their millions. I suspect they're so expensive precisely because people think they're "incredibly complex". Compared to, say, a mobile phone, they're about as complex as a toothbrush.

I didn't suggest they were by modern standards of complexity 'rocket science', they are very complex items as are mobile phones. Both are made to look simple internally by the use of microprocessors and a great deal of integration.

The one valid point you have made above is in regards to the cost comparison. Mobile phones are a commodity item with lots of competition. Car ECU's are a closed market with the only source of replacement the manufacturer. If your mobile fails, you can just walk into a shop and buy another the same, or another from another manufacturer. You cannot just walk into a shop and buy any ECU and then plug it into your car, you need the specific one not only for the make, but for the model, engine and in some cases engine derivative.

My own car model has around seven different ECU's available for it. Replacing it would require it to be set up to uniquely work with the other ECU's in my car.

You're an idiot and this correspondence is closed.

That'll be why of my 3 cars, 2 of them have aftermarket ECUs in them.

Pram - dummy!

Huge explained :

Complete aftermarket ECU's, or just remapped manufacturers one?

Is remapping banned from MOTS from January 2012?