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Comment by stergios | Hacker News Reader

Ron is an old friend. He's a very sharp and funny guy too. Ron was on the David Letterman show and Dave was cracking up while interviewing Ron right before he ran his bug down the track at the old Altamont Dragstip https://youtu.be/XTzxptdvt3c

I always enjoyed visiting Ron's lab at Stanford and chatting him up. Between talking with him and Fritz Rinehart at the other engine lab down the hall in bldg 500 I always felt I learned something new about combustion.

Personally, I preferred his 572 hemi mid sixties Chrysler. Now that was a scary car!

edit: spelling.

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During my undergrad and masters, I worked for Chris Edwards, who took over the IC engine lab from Fritz. It was a fun place to be -- running a single-cylinder research engine and a chevy LS1 on the dynos, setting up a miniature turbine engine and a hybrid rocket motor stand for the advanced undergrad thermo class. I arrived too late to meet Fritz, and I never had the pleasure of meeting Ron. I wish I had.

Hey jgable, nice to meet you. We must have missed paths in Fritz's lab. I wrote the control software for that LS1!

Hey stergios, I replaced your (DOS?) code with a modern aftermarket ECU.

Nice oneiric! Here's a screen grab from 1990 when we were breaking in the supercharger. http://www.marinopoulos.net/gallery2/d/15735-2/DUMP0000.gif

It was a DOS program, written in C. Fritz asked me to write it for Windows 2.1, but I said: "no thanks, all I need is a frame buffer and a GPIB IO Card". I made my own simple little graphics subsystem with fonts borrowed from X11.

Here's a little picture gallery I have of the ICE lab from 1990: http://www.marinopoulos.net/gallery2/v/Cars/StanfordEngineLa...

Enjoy!

Wow, what a blast from the past. When I first took the IC engines class, it was in that lab from your pictures. During grad school I helped move it over to the fancy new MERL building. I remember doing a project in undergrad to add closed-loop control of equivalence ratio via O2 sensors to the LS1.

I remember getting a wide band oxygen sensor and tuning the gain in the new ECU (and by tuning I mean eventually realizing turning it all the way up minimizes steady state error). When I worked with the setup, it had no supercharger and was a lab demo for the newly reintroduced engines class. (getting to be almost a decade ago, I should go visit) Did you guys do research with it?

Speaking of engine research, kind of crazy what production engines do these days: http://www2.mazda.com/en/next-generation/technology/ https://www.infinitiusa.com/now/technology/vc-turbo-engine http://www.etagen.com/technology/

No, I didn't do any research with the LS1. That was just an undergrad project for me, as a lab experiment for the engine class students to run.

Speaking of EtaGen (your third link), two of the founders, Shannon Miller and Matt Svrcek, are from Chris Edwards's group at Stanford. I worked with Matt quite a bit during undergrad. I knew Shannon but didn't work with her much directly. They are doing some very cool stuff. Their generator been in development a long time -- I hope it can go to production soon.

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