Hi, I just joined the forum after lurking here for a year. Thanks to the inspiration of Uncle Tony, I'm swapping a 1985 Dodge pickup slant into a 2004 RX8. I would like to trick the RX8 ECU into operating the slant. Where do I start?

You've really got your work cut out for you here. RX8 owners have enough trouble tricking their ECU into running a modified RX8 engine. If you just want the RX8 ECU to run body control functions, you could just graft all the sensors from the Renesis onto the slant six and ignore the injector and coil outputs.

Or just get some aftermarket gauges.

_________________
Matt Cramer
1966 Dodge Dart turbo / EFI project

Why do you want to do this? Sounds like doing things the hard way. Nobody here is going to have experience with this particular combination. Maybe somebody over on a RX8 site would have some ideas.

My answer to the 'Where do I start?' question is go start reading about MegaSquirt. It will do everything you need and there are a bunch of slanters here with MS experience. There is also a very large community of MS users who have applied MegaSquirt to hundreds of different kinds of engines. There is a HUGE wealth of knowledge over at DIYAutoTune for setting up and dialing in a MS system. Finally, when it's all together and running there are many dyno tuning shops around the country with MS tuning experience who could clean up and optimize the home-built tune.

_________________
--> Check out my FI Turbo build <--
--> And the race truck build project <--
--> The Diesel Corvette <--

Thanks for the input. My biggest concern is the electric power steering which is tied into the ECU. I may go hydraulic. The guys swapping Toyota 2JZ's have solved a lot of the problems. They even make plug-n-plays for LS engines.

Before I ditch the factory ECU I want to see what can be used.

Megasquirt will not control the electronic throttle body, but RusEFI will. I expect you'll keep the OE ECU to run gauges and other functions and have a standalone ECU for the engine. There's little hope of the Mazda ECU providing the correct fuel.

_________________
Joshua

Most electric power steering systems have a default setting they fall back to if they lose the signal from the ECU. It's typically something like 60% power. Those guys that have retrofit electric power steering into a custom car fine the default setting works fine.

_________________
--> Check out my FI Turbo build <--
--> And the race truck build project <--
--> The Diesel Corvette <--

https://www.maxxecu.com/products/street

How about this one? It has more than enough i/o to handle everything what is needed for inline six.

In my application it does sequential injection and wasted spark. It has built in wideband sensor which comes in the kit. I have also built extra injector for boost enrichment as well electric fan speed control. It will support also boost pressure control as soon I put parameters in. And does not need to play wit pcbs as the unit has been finished in to the box at the factory. Has pretty nice control software with good cababilities to get logged data.

_________________
1966 Dart. 170 cu.in. 200 rwhp.