This page is us — the people building it — walking you through the board the way we'd walk a fellow engineer through it. Real part numbers, real architecture, real design decisions. The only things we hold back are our control algorithms and calibration data, because that's the product. Everything else is on the table.
We didn't pick these parts to hit a price point. We picked them because each one is the correct tool, and most of them are the same silicon families the OEMs use.
168 MHz ARM Cortex-M4F. Every fuel and spark event is scheduled in hardware timers — the angle math happens in software, but the microsecond edge that fires your coil is held by silicon, not by an interrupt hoping to arrive on time. That's why timing stays rock-solid at redline.
Automotive-grade 8-channel injector + ignition pre-drivers — the same part family OEM ECUs are built on, rated for 15-year automotive life. Each channel reports open-load, short, and over-temperature individually over SPI, which is where our per-cylinder circuit diagnostics come from. The ECU doesn't guess a coil circuit is dead; the driver tells it.
A dedicated knock-sense DSP with a true differential sensor input — harness noise arrives on both wires and cancels; knock arrives on one and doesn't. Programmable bandpass tuned to the engine's knock frequency, with the listening window opened per cylinder, synchronized to crank position. Knock detection that's actually listening at the right time, at the right frequency, on a quiet input.
The Bosch LSU 4.9 wideband is a demanding little instrument — it needs continuous closed-loop control just to give you a number. We gave it its own processor so lambda control never competes with engine scheduling for CPU time. The main processor asks for lambda; the co-processor owns the sensor.
Dual independent CAN buses: one for your digital dash / telemetry, one as an expansion bus for MANA accessories (remote-key module, digital dash). Plus K-line, so the factory diagnostic port still answers after the swap.
Sealed automotive connector system — 35-position engine connectors + 14-position expansion, gold-plated contacts, positive latching. The same connector family you'll find on commercial standalones and OEM modules, because underhood is a hostile place and consumer connectors die there.
An entire inner copper layer is one unbroken ground plane. Millivolt-level knock and lambda signals live inches from coil drivers switching amps — the only honest fix is proper layer stackup, and we spent the board revision to get it right rather than ship noise.
Follow one revolution through the box.
The factory optical crank/cam sensor feeds conditioned inputs. On the very first crank, the ECU captures and validates your car's exact trigger pattern before it ever trusts it enough to schedule spark — a 30-year-old sensor gets verified, not assumed.
The decoder locks crank position and engine phase. From here the ECU knows, continuously, where every piston is to a fraction of a degree — through cranking sag, through redline.
Speed-density fueling: MAP + RPM + temperatures + lambda feedback in, injection mass and spark angle out, corrected for ethanol content if you're on flex fuel. This layer — the tables, the corrections, the strategies — is the part we keep closed. It's also cross-checked: boost overspeed guards, slew-rate limits, sensor sanity checks, and graduated limp modes stand between a bad sensor and a broken engine.
Fuel and spark events convert from crank angle to time and land in hardware timer channels. Software decides what; silicon guarantees when.
The MC33810s translate timer edges into gate drive for coils and injectors — with flyback clamping, short-circuit protection, and per-channel fault reporting on every single event.
The knock window opens for the cylinder that just fired. The wideband reports the mixture that cylinder event produced. Both feed back into step 3 for the next revolution. The loop never stops.
Most electronics die in cars for boring reasons: reversed jumper cables, alternator load dump, cranking sag. We designed for all three.
| Reverse battery | A power MOSFET does reverse-battery protection instead of a series diode — no voltage drop cooking away as heat, and hooking the battery up backwards is a non-event instead of a funeral. |
| Load dump | The battery input carries an automotive load-dump rated transient suppressor (Vishay SM8S class — a 6.6 kW pulse part, not a signal diode) sized for the real alternator-disconnect transient, with clamping levels chosen against the actual maximum ratings of every chip downstream. |
| Cranking sag | The supply design rides through cold-crank voltage sag without resetting — the ECU that's supposed to start your car shouldn't reboot because you're starting your car. |
| Sensor rails | Two independently protected 5 V sensor supplies from a dedicated automotive regulator, fed upstream of the main rail. A shorted sensor pulls its own rail down, gets flagged in diagnostics — and the engine keeps running on the other. |
| Every pin | Every harness-facing input has series limiting and over-voltage clamping. A miswired pin during your install is a diagnostic report, not a dead board. |
| The protocol layer | MANA speaks two languages. The industry-standard tuner protocol — so open tools like LibreTune connect directly, with our published definition file, exactly the way the Speeduino/rusEFI world works every day. And STP, our own high-rate link that carries the things no generic protocol has words for: the health check, the harness self-test, per-circuit fault detail, the reasoned DTC log. |
| MANA Studio | Our tuner rides on both. Live gauges and table editing like any tuner you've used — plus the diagnostic console: run the pre-drive health check from your laptop, click-test individual actuators, pull the fault log with the ECU's reasoning attached, and export a one-page report you can hand to any mechanic. |
| Auto-tune | Lambda-based VE learning with engineering guardrails, not a free-for-all: corrections are capped per pass and in total, cells need repeated agreeing samples before they move, a lean-protection ceiling blocks learning under boost, a hard rich floor flags instead of chasing, and a smoothing pass keeps the table physical. It converges your tune; it is not allowed to wreck it. |
| The tune library | Every unit ships loaded with a validated calibration for its exact generation, engine, and build level — seeded from real running data on this platform, not from a generic template with the cylinder count changed. |
| Your tune is yours | Tune files export and import freely. No dongles, no subscriptions, no per-laptop licenses, no locked tables. If you never want to open our software, the open tuner path is fully supported — we think the diagnostics will bring you back anyway. |
| Automated | The firmware runs against a suite of 1,300+ automated tests on every single change — trigger decoding, fueling math, fault paths, protocol handling. A change that breaks behavior doesn't merge. |
| Simulated | A hardware-in-the-loop rig plays a running engine at the ECU — real waveforms, real timing, fault injection — so "what happens if the crank sensor drops out at 6,000 RPM" gets answered on the bench, on purpose, instead of on your car by accident. |
| Captured | Before first start on a customer generation, we capture wire-level signals from real cars and replay them against the ECU. The firmware meets your car's actual electrical reality before your car does. |
| Bench-proven | Every unit that ships runs the full self-test battery on the bench, and its adapter is continuity-tested pin by pin. Your board's test report is in the box. |
Straight answer, because you deserve one.
| Closed | The firmware source, the control strategies inside step 3, and the per-variant calibration library. That's years of platform-specific work and it's the product you're buying. Every line of it is ours — written from scratch for these cars, no borrowed code, no license time-bombs. |
| Open | The tuner protocol (industry standard + published definition), your tune files, the connector pinouts you need to wire your car, and pages like this one. We'd rather earn trust by showing the engineering than demand it with a logo. |