From: Tony Williams 

Joe Barr wrote:
[snip]
> Anybody know what they use onboard for that kind of stuff in the F1 cars?
>

I don't know about these days, but Ford used to use an in-house OS running
on an Intel 8061 clocked at about 20MHz with 42K of program memory. The
8061 was a custom CPU produced only for Ford. Basically an 8051 with some
extra A/D and D/A converters and a fancy hardware interrupt scheduler.

The F1 build was based on the standard EFI code you'd in in a family saloon
but heavily modified at the code level (as opposed to the after-market
chips you can buy which only have tweaked engine map data).

As well as running the engine the same EEC-IV unit provided at least some
of the telemetry, but I don't know what other monitoring systems they had
on board.

The whole system was written in assembler and we used to
laugh at the idea of using a high level language. The hardware we had at
the time (mid '80s) just couldn't have handled the
overhead.

Anyone got some more up to date info?

--
Tony

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