Home » Old Circuit Boards Are Weirdly Pretty: Cold Start

Old Circuit Boards Are Weirdly Pretty: Cold Start

Cs Ecu Top2
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We all know our cars are jam-packed full of little parts, things that connect moving things or bits that hold in fluids or spinning shafts or bits of metal designed to let electrons flow through them in controllable ways. We don’t always look at these parts for their aesthetic qualities, but sometimes you can’t help but notice. And today, for whatever reason, I noticed the strange visual appeal of a part that we generally don’t think of as visually all that interesting: the circuit boards of an ECU.

Specifically, I was looking at one of the first ECUs ever to be used in a production car, the Bosch D-Jetronic fuel injection system, which was really an update of the old 1950s-era Bendix Electrojector system. The first production car to use this system was the Volkswagen Type 3, and it was in an old brochure for the Type 3 that I saw this ECU board.

Vidframe Min Top
Vidframe Min Bottom

Here’s the picture from the brochure:

Cs Ecu 1

Let’s zoom and enhance on the circuit board, and what the hell, add a little blue tint:

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Cs Ecu 2

What strikes me most about this circuit board compared to the more modern boards I see is the seeming chaos of it all. It’s of course designed rationally and to a very specific circuit diagram, but it just looks so haphazard compared to modern boards. There’s no true digital circuits on that ECU there, and about 25 transistors are doing most of the processing.

VW was quite proud of their computer-in-a-car and featured it in ads:

Cs Ecu Ad

The “think” sign references the old IBM slogan, which was also “think.”

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Here’s a period video with some great close-ups of the PCB and its components:

Here, look at a close up of a more modern ECU, this one from a Scion:

Cs Ecu Scion

Of course, the components are far smaller and the density of the traces is vastly greater, but there’s also a much more rigorous grid-type organization system going on here. There’s orders of magnitudes more transistors and other components on here, now surface-mounted, and the whole thing looks like some kind of advanced alien metropolis seen from far above as opposed to the scattershot-looking complexity of the old board.

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What I really like about printed circuit boards from the ’60s and ’70s though are the traces themselves, which often have a strange psychedelic-art kind of look. Here’s an example of what I mean from a very famous source, the now iconic Atari CX40 joystick:

Cs Ecu Cx40

See those strangely flowing and almost biomorphic shapes of the traces? That kind of thing was all over ’70s printed circuit boards, including some found in cars. Here’s the back of another Bosch Jetronic ECU board from the ’70s, with plenty of whimiscal-looking traces:

Cs Ecu Bosch 4

…or the snakey, labyrinthine goodness of this Mopar ECU from some Chrysler:

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Cs Ecu Chrysler

Anyway, next time you’re at a junkyard, I highly encourage you to look for something from the mid 70s or 80s, dig around and find some ECU box bolted under a seat or to a firewall and pry it open to get to the hidden beauty within. There’s so many more and better examples out there. They make fun wall art!

 

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Scott
Scott
13 days ago

Jason, I swear: if you turn out to have any other interests/fetishes/obsessions identical to mine, we’re going to have to get DNA tests and run gdiff on the results.

MinorComprehension
MinorComprehension
23 days ago

In my kid-brain, where I spend most of my time, I like to think of PCBs as small cities. The traces being roadways, components like processors being big aggregating areas like buildings or schools or libraries, transistors or ICs being houses with bigger ones being condos, capacitors being water towers, resistors being bus stops, on computer boards the Ethernet port being a big bank vault or “batman” type building…

There’s really no shortage of imaginative possibilities or similarities between a birds-eye of a metropolis, with all those little electrons dutifully travelling about their daily lives… Up until some problematic dry capacitor gives out, or a interstate trace burns up and sends all the commuters into a backed up frizzy and clogging all the side-roads…

Older boards are certainly not as “detailed” but still definitely work if you think more 70’s AARP map level detail, with big old potentiometers or massive capacitors being major cities and the traces being the major roadways.

Anyways, just a kid-brain thought.

Hugh Crawford
Hugh Crawford
23 days ago

Doesn’t everybody think of PCBs as small cities?
Maybe Amsterdam, or Suzhou, or Bruges, or some other city built on canals.

Carey Rose
Carey Rose
23 days ago

Absolutely fascinating! Fun design really can be found everywhere, in the most unexpected places. Especially neat to see as I just recently took an intro soldering class.

Freelivin2713
Freelivin2713
23 days ago

You better think (think)
Think about what you’re trying to do to me
Yeah, think (think, think)
Let your mind go, let yourself be free
Oh freedom (freedom), freedom (freedom)
Freedom, yeah freedom
Freedom (freedom), freedom (freedom)
Freedom, ooh freedom

-Aretha Franklin

“It’s 106 Miles to Chicago. We’ve Got a Full Tank of Gas, Half a Pack of Cigarettes, It’s Dark, and We’re Wearing Sunglasses.”

Cheap Bastard
Cheap Bastard
23 days ago

“What you won’t get are carburetor problems. Because there is no carburetor. Nothing to adjust, nothing to clean, nothing to flood”

So instead of the problems we gave you on our older products we’ve come up with a complete set of BRAND NEW fuel injection and computer problems!!

Cars? I've owned a few
Cars? I've owned a few
23 days ago
Reply to  Cheap Bastard

I’ll take FI any day, every day, over carburetors.

My ’68 Datsun 510 was susceptible to fuel starvation when I drove over a stretch of I-405 at a certain speed range. The expansion joint bumps would set up a wave pattern in the float chamber that would keep the float valve shut, and the engine would essentially run out of gas until the car coasted down to a slower speed and allowed the valve to reopen. It was just that stretch of what was then called the “San Diego Freeway.”

Having to pull the choke to start on a cold morning? No thanks. “Automatic” chokes were prone to failure, as were accelerator pumps that would briefly enrichen the mixture when the butterflies opened up.

I have had far more FI cars than ones with carburetors but had far more fueling issues with the latter. Never had a problem with the FI engines. Ever.

Hugh Crawford
Hugh Crawford
23 days ago

It’s still the “San Diego Freeway.” Damit!

A friend moved from LA to Tallahassee Florida, but she still lives just off the Santa Monica Freeway.

I had a VW Dasher that suffered from carburetor icing. Other than that carbs always worked for me. It’s truly amazing how screwed up a carburetor can be and still work well enough for the engine to sort of run On the other hand, FI never seems to catch fire.

Cheap Bastard
Cheap Bastard
23 days ago
Reply to  Hugh Crawford

“FI never seems to catch fire.”

A buddy of mine had a ’79 VW van with FI and it caught fire a few times.

Cheap Bastard
Cheap Bastard
23 days ago

Me too. FI has been an enormous advancement, however I’m old enough to remember when a lot of folks ripped out FI systems and replaced them with carburetors because they couldn’t handle the complexity of FI*, hence my comment.

(Not the spaghetti hosed emissions controlled nightmares of the 1980s carburetors but simple, dirty Holly/Carter/weber/SUs.)

ClutchAbuse
ClutchAbuse
22 days ago

Same. FI all the way. I’ve never had a problem with it on any of the vehicles I’ve owned.

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