Commercial Tier 4F diesels of the John Deere variety have latching fault codes when they relate to the aftertreatment system. It requires the manufacturer's proprietary scan tool (which they will not sell to you) to clear the code, even if the actual issue was something as simple as a connector left unplugged for too long.

Requiring proprietary dongles/software to clear fault codes are not uncommon, but I'm surprised there hasn't been enough interest for there to be a 3rd party tool.

Like McDonald's Shake Machines had a 3rd party tool to help diagnose issues.

There is interest, but thanks to DMCA 1201 they put a thin veneer of encryption on it and suddenly it's a felony to make/use that third party tool.

We could, of course, repeal DMCA section 1201, but no one in government wants to do that.

The difficulty of fighting against things which are concentrated benefits to a few, and diffuse harms to everyone else. :/

The McDonald's stuff in particular is a red herring. Their requirements are contract requirements, put in place after too many franchisees tarnished their name with listeria outbreaks.

Right, but the solution shouldn't have been a racketeering scheme.

This is the risk of franchising in general. You lose a certain amount of control over quality and you put your brand at much greater risk. In exchange, you get to expand your brand much faster than if you did it under centralized control and investment.

Large generators are fuel-injected, which requires a microcontroller with software.

In the 1990s that software was write-once, non-upgradeable, and bug-free because it was trivial. But it hasn't been that way for a long time. "Fuel injection requires software" turned into an exploit vector for feature creep.

To be needlessly pedantic, fuel injection does require a micro. I only say this because I deal with classic Bosch K-Jet systems often.

Detroit diesel two strokes were entirely mechanical. As were cummins engines like b5.9 with a bosch p-pump. In fact all diesel engines have fuel injection, and they were all mechanical up to the 80s/90s.

I assume you meant to say does not require a microcontroller, given that Bosch K is a mechanical FI system.

There's also analog EFI, which was rare and expensive and otherwise not great: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendix_Electrojector

The early electronic components were not reliable in an underhood environment and were not easily modified as engine control requirements advanced. Most of the 35 vehicles originally equipped with Electrojector were retrofitted with 4-barrel carburetors.

Yeah but you can just get a Megasquirt DIY kit and make your own ECU for most EFI engines (from 1 to 16 cylinders). To the other person's comment about the generator circuitry: most generators are pretty simple mechanically, you can make a new circuit to control the output.

I'm guessing the rationale of the law is to prevent needing a repair company to exist & reinvent the electrical components of every single product in existence.

Idk about the commercial units, but my portable inverter generator has a bunch of schmoo (highly technical industry term) that covers the entire electronics board. If a component on that board fried, I'm not able to repair it without replacing the whole board.

The rest is fairly simple ICE like you say.

Conformal coating? That used to be the norm way back in the day for all kinds of electronics. Kind of a dick move, now, unless there is an environmental reason.

Normal on anything that has to work outside. Also, hardly an impediment to repair. I've done it myself on a car ECU: open case, scrape off conformal coating, desolder blown IGBT, replace with IGBT salvaged from junkyard unit, spray on new conformal coating, done - been working like that now for 5 years.

Parts pairing is also a/the reason you can't just swap in the junkyard unit even though it came from a car with the same engine. We tried it - did not work.

Potting within a brick of epoxy is the real dick move, but also not impossible to repair either.

That pairing is for theft reasons - chop shops will steal a car, take the parts off and sell them. However the expensive computers are paired and so they won't work when sold this way thus making the value of a car to a shop shop much less and so helping prevent that theft mode.

Though I think there should be a process to get the parts paired after verifying the car isn't stolen. I'm not sure what that would be though.

I'm going to guess that it's actually potted in epoxy, not just a conformal coating.

Probably epoxy potted, an order of magnitude more difficult to repair. Either way a coating is probably called for in the places a generator will be used so you probably wouldn't want to skip it just for repairability.

Typically a generator is used outdoors, so it makes sense to protect the PCB and other electronics from conditions experienced there. I wouldn't know what those conditions are, being on Hacker News and all.

I just had a new 48kw generator installed on my property and it was a nightmare with Generac. It's apparently a new model and it took them 4 tries to get the right controller sent to the tech to get it up and running.

Coincidentally I am in Washington State.