Mechatronics Projects

To provide a rough overview about the complexity of the projects we will assign
a 1 to 10 open source transistors (the logo of www.openhardware.de):

Mechatronics projects are made from electro-mechanical stuff, sensors, actors, electronics, microcontrollers and software:
we will use sensors, actors like solenoids, analog and digital electronics and micrcontrollers and their software.

As the prices for fuel are constantly rising and the oil-ressources are limited, we should look for alternatives.
One simple alternative is running a diesel-engine with vegetable oil. Rape oil is cheap and has good properties when used in a diesel-engine.
Because of its higher burning-point and the higher viscosity it has to be pre-heated before injection. Modifying cars for rape oil is becomming more and more popular in Germany.
if you are looking for pages about this topic type poel which is an acronym for Planzenoel (german for vegatable oil) in your favorite web search engine.

After reading some articles on the web, I decided to modify my own car, a BMW 525TDS, Model E34 for rape oil. Here I want to make maximum use the ressources of my car by modifying ECUs, or mechanical components.
The project BMW-M51-vegoil has the following stages:

heating of vegatable oil
add diesl fall-back for winter use (rape oil can become solid if it is cold enough)
build a veg-oil infrastructure (storage and filling station)

BMW-M51-Vegoil project-folder