U are right he can post his opinion on stuff and only an opinion if he wants to post facts about fixing a car they should be correct or they will get mine and several others EXPERT opinion on the matter. Tell me this your PC at home do u go around and solder on new resistors or capacitors or anything else to it? I would hop not and why because unless u are the guy that has the e\blue print of the system or actually knows how the system works u are asking for trouble in trying to do it yourself. The adding a conspirator to a battery for 99% of what he has posted is BS. Wont do a damn thing. Common sense must be used in most cased on this forum people give ideas on how to do or fix things there is nothing wrong with that this is whats the and any forum is for. But what he posts simply wrong. Unless some one can do that to a US car and it correctly fix what ever it is issues he dais it fixes Im going to stand my ground and add my open professional opinion to about any post he makes about adding additional resistors capacitors potentiometers to anything .

 

Almost all of what leedsman said makes sense to me. It depends on how expert an EXPERT is in the field of experience he SHOUTS his expert opinion in ! You might be right, leedsman's opinion might not lead to solutions. He as yet offers no solutions, just common sense opinions to be debated and considered.

 

Thanks, Qintec. I think there is some background psychological stuff going on here not revealed in the overt discussion. It is the genesis of "flame wars" perhaps. It's unfortunately one of the problems with public fora generally, when someone has problems keeping up with technologies and their constant shifting, especially when that someone sees him/herself in a 'senior' position. I realized that when I used to teach electronics at ADT for a number of years. All the engineers I taught were middle aged.
I take it all *** salo granis -- after all, I'm not getting paid for all this help I'm giving!

Leedsman.

 

Hey, how about we all post our experience and qualifications, at least in our profiles. That may make much of this a moot point. Some do, too many don't.

 

Well I've built computers and done some of my own vehicle work without any help from others and not have problems, I'm using my latest right now. What level does this make me? No I'm not a novice, I look at what needs done and just do something about it. Not trying to bash on ppl here.

 

Simple maintenance any ne one can do Part swappers are the same ne one can turn a wrench.

 

Sorry to bring this rather old discussion about the capacitors up again, but I just ran into this post and I cannot resist telling one thing (a blast) from the past.

Around the mid '90s I came up with the idea that my electrical R/C car needed to go faster (who wouldn't have) . So I went to a store and bought a new motor for the car. Everything was pretty fine after the upgrade, except... After few mins of driving, sometimes even after just a few seconds, the car started to shake back and forth like a regular car running out of gas, although I requested a full throttle on the control. I tried to look for the issue and finally got back to the store asking for advice. The guy immediately asked, did I have "the interference-removing-capacitors installed" (or whatever you call them). I said: "What're those!??" Turned out the motor needed capacitors installed to reduce "interference", or noise if you like, so that one leg is on the motor terminal and the other one on the motor housing. Same thing for both terminals. Now with these two tiny harmless-looking capacitors in place I sceptically gave it a try and all my problems were gone.

Just trying to give you an example here, that everything what Leedsman said about the capacitors, made perfect sense to me and brought the memory of that young kid with his R/C car up again.

I also have to agree with the other guys that the capacitors may not necessarily solve any problems, but what they do is they kind of stabilize the current coming from the alternator to the TIPM by "cutting the spikes out" and thus saving the circuitry elsewhere in the system. And further on, because the electrical system in vehicles usually has pretty stable 12-14V DC, making it even more stable with a couple of capacitors is not going to harm anything is it.

Does this make any sense to you guys? Sorry if my terminology is not the most accurate. I intentionally tried to keep things simple to make it maybe easier to understand what the reason for using the capacitors is and what they are used for.

 

Wc80, your observations are quite normal to an electronics engineer. Power supplies to microprocessors need "filtering" to remove all sorts of nasties living on those very power lines. Even the 3-phase national grid supplies have this problem, and a special machine for monitoring and recording glitches is used to assess. These can amount to 750volt on top of the normal domestic supply. If that glitch sits on top of the +ve half cycle of the domestic supply of 230volt RMS, there is a total instantaneous peak of 1070volt.

As regards glitches on top of the 12volt nominal car battery, probably the easiest way of reducing the glitches for an amateur is to either parallel-connect another battery, or use a much bigger battery. This was shown up on my test with a digital oscilloscope on one of my postings, I forget which for the moment. The use of a big capacitor across the battery had a similar effect, but it has to be really big in capacitance. As I have no microprocessor trouble with my GV, (unlike the Jaguar I had before) I've not progressed with it further, but I was musing with the idea of fitting a one FARAD 16volt supercapacitor, or even bigger if I could get one. However, being a Yorkshireman, I couldn't stomach the price. Using supercapacitors so big would also help with cranking, as the battery voltage wouldn't drop so far, some of the starter current being supplied by the supercapacitor. Some of the german manufacturers are openly toying with this idea to deal with battery problems in the "stop-start" cars. If you mess with supercapacitors in this application, don't connect them across the battery just like that. You could set the leads on fire. Instead connect through a car headlight bulb until it goes out. This could take a little while.

Chief sources of car glitches are the alternator (see my posting) and the starter motor. Alternators have been known for many years for producing "alternator-whine" in some radio and sound sytems in cars, partic. if transmitting. A very big electrolytic capacitor across the battery or alternator is the usual 'fix' for this problem. It has to be very big, well over 100,000 microfarads. (You'll have already worked out that one FARAD is a million microfarads...) An unwelcome fact about electrolytic capacitors is their FINITE LIFE. They very gradually dry out and lose capacitance over time. So on a ten year old vehicle, any such capacitors fitted in the wiring system (and not shown on the schematics) will have "lost it" and need replacing. Even the good Panasonic electrolytics are only guaranteed for 5000 hours of use.

There are other ways of de-glitching a power supply, the main one being the use of a VDR (Voltage Dependant Resistor) across that supply. It must have an o/c rating just above the normal -- say 16volt for a car job. It works by "squashing" or shorting out the glitch spike while being o/c for the normal line voltage. The VDR is not partic. frequency sensitive, unlike the electrolytic capacitor which is. A better capacitor would be the organic electrolytics made by japanese Sharp, but they cost a lot more, and are used in better quality switched-mode power supplies. Otherwise "hash" or what's called random noise can appear on the output affecting -- yes you've guessed it -- any microprocessor it's connected to... There used to be a certain Panasonic video recorder which had this very problem of hash from a switch-mode power supply upsetting the mechanism control microprocessor. It was on the 12volt supply line...



Leedsman.

 

We are still living in a World of There is Always Something New to Patent...Look at Dyson, Hoover and Electrolux just laughed at his idea when he showed them his idea.
We also live in a world where Manufacturers cannot make perfect parts that work forever as there is big money in repairing them.
Perhaps Leedsman has stumbled on an answer here to make electronic parts last forever...
Ooops only thing is he is likely to get bumped off by CIA and any of this on here will be gagged by court writs....

 

Wow, trying to read thru all the electrical glitches before I try to tackle my 08 t&c. But, I have to say, this thread has kinda got "side-tracked". As yet, has anyone traced the problem down yet? Sounds like so far, 1-I should probably start at the battery connections, 2-carefully inspect batt. cables and connections. 3-ck wiring harness at the TIPM-fuse box- underneath, tap on top and see if it affects the glitches.4- ck alternator connection, possibly run the vehicle to auto place to have alternator ck'd. 5-(probably should be #3) ck wiring harnesses at both sliding doors. 6-ck ECM under body, behind dr. side front tire behind wheel well plastic 7- tap, or thunk! on dash above guage cluster so see if glitches on dash instruments are affected. ???????
Hmmm,