I was wondering if anyone had tried the moates 'switcher' hardware with the remote (via a 10 way ribbon) dial? You know the idea, load up an larger than stock capacity eprom with mutliple different bins for different driving conditions, e.g. performance, economy, towing etc, with a dashboard mounted dial to select the bin you want to run. Effectivlely a scaled down version of running off of an Ostrich and laptop, with a number of distict pre-loaded bins to choose from rather than total interactive bin control.

Surely this setup lends itself towards an easy non-obvious anti-theft device? If one of the bins is an intentional 'dud', e.g. zerored fuel tables (or spark, or all blank?? not sure), then if you left the bin-selection dial on that dud bin, the car woulfn't start, even if hot wired?

I'm thinking of implementing such a scheme, maybe even more advanced. The moates switcher dial is simply a dial that sets the desired pins of the cable and switcher in binary from 0 to 15. This could be replaced with a number keypad hooked up to a simple micro-controller with the necessary input and outputs to emulate the moates dial (see ByVac for cheap micro controller examples), and with a little tinkering could effectively make a car disabled until a PIN is entered, thus selecting a valid working bin rather than a duff one.

What do people think?

 

That is one way to do it. The thief could just turn the switch though once they see the ribbon cable leading to the box.

If they wanted in bad enough then they could swap out ECMs. You are better off messing with the HEI wires for a more fool-proof anti-theft device.