Info on sprint booster.

Ivoidwarranty

I've noticed this sprint booster come up in conversations before and I have ran across the Sprint Booster before in a number of other forums. The first I heard of them was for the Mercedes and then the Chrysler LX platform. A lot of guys love this thing but they have no idea what it does or how it does it. A lot of other guys know what it does and hate it. If you have a programmer that can adjust throttle sensitivity (among other things) you can do the same thing.

Most of these electronic throttles work off a 5 volt reading. Someone tried to argue with me the other day that it's millivolts but I think it's volts (I may be wrong, it's happened before). When the accelerator is not depressed, a 0 volt reading is sent to the computer from the sensor. When the accelerator is pushed down, a signal is sent to the computer from the accelerator sensor. This signal is maxed out at 5 volts when the accelerator pedal is completely depressed. I believe the signal is completely linear, meaning at half throttle there is 2.5v. Now, when the signal gets to the computer either magic happens or hell breaks loose. Just because you have the throttle pushed down half way doesn’t mean the throttle is open half way. The computer totally takes control and decides what to do with the throttle blades based on a number of inputs and your right foot is only one of them.

This Sprint Booster just intercepts the signal from the accelerator and “boosts” it. They call it “boost”, I call it a signal multiplier. Well, it can’t go over 5 volts but it can get you to 5 volts a lot sooner. So, whether it multiplies the original signal by 1.5 or by 2 or whatever, all it really does is take away your full length of peddle travel. Why would anyone want to do that?

Some other things of note:

My Dodge uses a redundant signal (backup) that goes from 0-2.5v and the computer compares the two inputs to make sure the sensor and signal is not messed up (safety stuff). I'm sure all makes have something similar to this.

Don’t call this sensor on the back of the peddle TPS (throttle position sensor) that’s totally something else. This is called APPS (Accelerator Pedal Position Sensor) by some manufactures including Nissan.

Another one of those inputs to the computer is how “fast” you push the accelerator down (more on that next post).