Rotarytronics is a 1 man-show based in Europe, Romania. My formal education is in applied electronics and programming; having graduated with a master’s degree in 2022. Everything is done in house and by 1 guy: hardware/software engineering (even reverse engineering at times!), design, testing, production, logistics, customer support and, as time allows, some little marketing.
The idea for a super-niche webshop of all the things 99% of people would never think of making did not come over night. It didn’t come… at all? It all started with a gripe of mine and the Mazda RX8. It snowballed from there.
Everyone said “get it compression tested first”, and they were right, but where? I didn’t have any local dealership who could do it, and even when there was one, the cost of a single test was nothing to sneeze at. It came to my mind that if I needed a compression tester that won’t cost an arm and a leg, then I should be the one to create it.
I started prototyping with an oscilloscope, a pressure transducer and a laptop.
After melting a starter and destroying another one I was done developing the core function of the compression tester, that is, to find the peaks of compression on every rotor face. Beyond that, showing data on a LCD, compensating for RPM, altitude, some extra features, it really wasn’t too much of a stretch. Production started in 2020 and has been ongoing ever since, providing hundreds of customers with a “stealership” tool for the cost of what they would have paid for 1 compression test.
Getting confident I can make a difference for many people I went on and created something even more daring: a way to turn those pesky coolant and oil gauges inside the RX8 cluster into something useful. It turned out to be doable, and work very well. Installation surely was not very easy, but being a retrofit/mod, soldering had to be used. There really is not much to it, just soldering some wires to some points the manual tells you to.I was frustrated with Mazda not putting a true oil pressure sensor in the RX8 or any other car of that age so I had to supply my customers with one and the hardware needed to use it; surely the money saved was not worth it, was it Mazda?
At least for coolant temp things were pretty straightforward and didn’t require a sensor at all – this lead to the creation of a version for S2 RX8s, the ones that do not have an oil pressure gauge inside their cluster.
Anyway, none of my endeavors would have been possible without trusting customers that saw what can be done when passion, rotors, engineering and perseverance all meet together.
What no one has achieved in the 18 years since this car was mad… really baffled my mind. So many people wished for these gauges, and here they are, albeit kind of too late. Not in my eyes, for as long as there is gasoline (and oil, duh!), the rotary shall live on!
By the start of 2023 I’ve started doing a little something for the MX5 crowd as well, and may I say it turned out 10 times as good as I had hoped it would.In 2024 the product range expanded with more gauges for the RX8, namely the SuperSimple Ashtray Gauge Kit, the RX8 CGK, and the BMW F-series.
In 2025 I started scaling up, with confidence that there are people out there that share my views on the OEM+ theme. The MX5 NC CKG V2 was launched, with plug and play support to do away with soldering, and the RX7 FD also got a taste of it.
Around this time I also started more seriously to reverse engineer the factory RX8 engine ECU, because existing comercial reflash solutions were, and still are, terrible. The things I saw inside of it enlightened me to no end; there were so many low hanging fruits there that make owning an RX8 so much better: I could delete the conditions that might result in engine flooding, build protections against overheating, uncover literally hundreds of more tables than previously known to exist… a real field day!
