1,000 followers, part 3 of 4: how Stan Meyer's water buggy knew when to fire (Memo WFC 423 DA)

Part 3 of the 1,000-follower drop: timing, from Stan Meyer's Memo WFC 423 DA. "The hydrogen computer system you see here will be miniaturized down to several IC chips," he said at his garage in 1990. Position comes from his laser distributor, light gates fitted between the distributor and the cap; Figure 4-24, Rotational Pulse Generator, turns those pulses through an LM331 frequency-to-voltage converter into an engine-speed signal. Figure 4-8, Digital Inject Circuit, does the arithmetic on the page: a four-stroke fires each cylinder once every two turns, so "@ 800 R.P.M. ÷ 2 ÷ 60 sec = 6.6 pulses / sec", 25 a second at 3,000 rpm and 66.6 at 8,000, each pulse sent through an H11D1 optocoupler to a TIP120 Darlington and the water inject coil. Figure 4-18, Pulse Shift Control, advances the firing point with 556 delay timers as the engine speeds up, which is what a distributor's timing advance does. In Orlando in 1992 he called the whole thing the water fuel management system, "a computer system that now controls the water flow and the firing of the water fuel injectors." A modern engine computer does the same job from a crank sensor; Stan drew his in off-the-shelf chips. Every page is free at stanslegacy.com. Part 4: the kill switches.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer at his garage · 1990 interview
• Stan Meyer · Global Sciences Congress, Orlando, 1992
• Stan Meyer · Memo WFC 423 DA, Water Fuel Injection System · Figure 4-24: Rotational Pulse Generator
• Stan Meyer · Memo WFC 423 DA, Water Fuel Injection System · Figure 4-8: Digital Inject Circuit
• Stan Meyer · Memo WFC 423 DA, Water Fuel Injection System · Figure 4-18: Pulse Shift Control
• Stan Meyer · Memo WFC 423 DA, Water Fuel Injection System · Figure 4-20: Primary Voltage Amplitude / Pulse Gate Control
• Stan Meyer, Memo WFC 423 DA: Figures 4-8, 4-18, 4-20, 4-24 — stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer at his garage, 1990 interview, at 2:54
• Stan Meyer, Global Sciences Congress, Orlando, 1992, at 38:18