How to make an ECU Patch Loom?

[Roundy]

Hey Guys,

I am looking to make a patch loom from my adaptronic to my existing wiring loom.

I have obtained one of these



Which will allow me to plug my stock loom into there.

However, I can't for the life of me figure out how I am meant to attach the wires to the back of this plug.

Do I get hold of some ecu terminals to just plug them into the back of this?

And if so, how is it you ensure that they don't come off during use? Heat shrink over all of them?

Cheers
Nathan

[RA35GT]

Nathan, either use a PCB to solder the connector onto and provide tracks you can solder to, or just solder wire directly to the legs out the back. (I am just going to solder/heatshrink the wires directly to the legs out of the back).

[CHB]

Yeah just cut the 90 degree bend on all the pins and solder wires straight onto them. Should work brilliantly....

[blakeg]

whered you get that ? i will get one too.

[beerhead]

30cm Adapt loom soldering iron and insulate each pin with heat shrink when you solder it all together, just in case they get crushed and short out.

[Roundy]

whered you get that ? i will get one too.

Wolf EMS sell them, pretty farken handy.

Thanks for the quick responses guys, wasn't quite expecting soldering to be honest, but soldering it is....after some practise.

[TERRA Operative]

I made an adaptronic patch loom for my 4AGZE with one of those.

Cue photo of dodgy messy wiring:

[Roundy]

So much cross over.

Looks pretty good, i hope i can get mine to that stage

How long did it take you to do that??

[jonathan yee]

that doesn't look messy at all. be sure to have a good soldering iron so you heat it quick and don't melt the plug, i also found little alligator clips to hold the wire whilst soldering helped.

[TERRA Operative]

Yea, it worked out ok. The crossover of all the wires just looks messy....
The trick is to measure twice then measure again and pre plan where the wires will go. Also use a good soldering iron.
I got a sheet of A3 paper and made a chart to tell me what pins on the new ECU plugs went to what pins on the adapter plug. After working out all that, it's basically paint by numbers.

It took me about 2 hour or so IIRC. I just sat myself infront of my computer and ran a few episodes of the latest anime download while I did it.
Kind of hard to concentrate on soldering while trying to read subtitles though......

[slide86]

Thats a good bit of hardware.

4ag and variants have a 10/18/14 pin ecu setup......where would i find a similar setup to be able to make a plug like the one above? I checked the wolf site, and their plug is apparently not compatible with this pin setup??

[beerhead]

You can always pull one from a stock ecu. Solder sucker and a soldering iron and you're laughing. Takes a while but it'll be worth it. Go raid an SV21 for an ECU if you don't want to kill your 4A one.

[JP]

I've found the best way to connect the wires to the ECU header pins is to crimp small square terminals to the wires first (Adaptronic pins meant for their black ECU connectors work great for this). I cut the header pins off to about 8mm long with a cutoff disc on the grinder, apply flux to the pins and then slide the terminals onto each of their respective trimmed pins. I also press out all the not-required pins from the header.

When soldering the interfaces I also like to have ECU plugs inserted into the header to act as a heatsink so the pins dont melt the plastic of the header and move around. Once it's all done I slide all the heatshrink sections down over the interfaces and shrink them up with a heat-gun.

With that all done I then make up a perspex base plate that the ECU header is screwed onto and then I use zip-ties to secure the loom to the header so none of the solder joins experience any flex.

Another advantage of using terminals on the end of the wire is there's less chance of solder wicking up the wire which can create a brittle section in the wire.

The "best" way I've seen for doing the plug-in boards is to use a header PCB that has two sockets mounted to it, the patch loom then just has pins crimped to the end if it's wires and placed into standard plugs to suit the header on the adapter. By doing it like this you dont have any excess wire-strain on the solder joints et, but it does cost significantly more... eg: http://www.vi-pec.com/image_files/pl..._V88Plugin.jpg or http://www.vi-pec.com/image_files/pl...5L_Adaptor.jpg

The terminal on pin version ends up looking like this:

[Roundy]

And where does one find these terminals?

I have found a place in the states that sells them, but they seem a little expensive (well more than i thought the terminals should cost)

[JP]

I got a bag of them from my local adaptronic distributor