Time for Megasquirt round II

[Big Thurs]

Well, something went wrong with my megasquirt about one or two months ago and the car has been out of commission with an ever growing list of problems. After much deliberation, I have decided to start over from scratch with a new ms1 on a v3 board. This time, now that I know exactly how I want it set up, I will ditch the breakout board and wire directly to the connectors of the breakout board for interfacing with the stock harness and use oem style connectors for the supplementary harness instead of d-sub connectors. The edis module will be deleted and I will use the 36-1 trigger wheel and ford vr sensor that are already installed, as well as the edis coil pack driven by megasquirt directly. Hopefully this set up will eliminate most of the clutter in my trunk from adding things one at a time. Pretty much everything will also be mounted in a stock ecu case so I can have plenty of room to reinstall my trunk carpet. Anywho, I'll post my progress as I move along.

[328FTW]

That is basically my setup for my racecar. However Mr Racecar went away with rod knock. I did the logical thing........revved it till it seized then felt cheated cause I was trying to throw a rod. Only big difference is I'm driving the stock coil through the dizzy off crank trigger. Need a couple bits to run wasted spark but I have the coils on bedside table along with the wires ends/boots for it.

My wiring is super simple I can unplug and drop the motor in about 15 minutes and with no wires around getting at the fuel rail etc is easy. However I'm not running much out of the case and I dunno how many add ons you have.

[Big Thurs]

One major hurdle has been crossed; fitting the ms board with the main connector in the stock case. Now its time to figure out how to organize the rest of the wiring.

[Jackstand Queen]

About 10 months ago Megasquirt DIYautotune.com came out with the MS Plug n Play version. It uses a MSII version board. You can buy them assembled or DYI build it yourself kits.

I just purchased a kit for the 4agze engine. Its supposed to work with oem everything, except of course dumping the AFM and going MAP sensing method.

If my MS quits working, I should be able to plug the AFM back in, plug up the MAP sensor vacuum line, and plug the oem ECU back in.

My kit should arrive in the mail tomorrow. I think I'm gonna have nightmares tonight though.

[Liger]

I used the DIY PNP kit on my MK2 and wired it all up with the stock sensors and harness. I can hot swap between the factory ecu and the Megasquirt one if necessary.

[Big Thurs]

K. Update time: I've been incredibly busy lately but now that work has slowed down, I have some time to post this. After running into many errors/problems as expected, I now have rpm reading in tunerstudio. For some reason megatune no longer can access my virtual serial port after upgrading the converter driver so tunerstudio will not crash but thats an entirely different story. I took a few brief tooth logs last night and everything is looking good so far. The problem is there seems to be no fuel. I'll take home some more tools and get this sorted tonight. I'll get some more pics up when I get a chance.

[toyotaspeed90]

I tend to not use tunerstudio and just use Megatune.... the software package that DIY Autotune makes everything work and match... that is the firmware and the software so they can talk to one another...

if you're having problems with the computer... if you're using a USB adapter... not all work or are MS friendly... I just happened to get one that worked, but it's a well known problem.... usually just for my sanity sake, I just use a serial 9 port instead of a USB....

as for the fuel.... make sure your settings are correct for the injectors resistance...

[Big Thurs]

When my previous MS crapped out on me, it shorted one (possibly both) coils to ground. Got a new edis coil and now it sparks!
My previous experiences with TS were all of high resource usage on a low resource laptop. Now I use a much faster laptop, but no serial port. Serial port handling has been a problem with windows with every electronic project (using rs232) I have encountered. My converter is a crappy prolific chipset device which only adds to the problem. It was working just fine with MT, then I changed the driver so TS would work, now I cant get MT to work with any driver....but thats beside the point. Also beside the point, I could not get MT to not give code signature mismatch errors while running hr11d.

Hopefully I can get the wheel decoder and trigger settings sorted out tonight and get the sucker running again.

[328FTW]

TS is a PITA for me on my laptop. Not that it matters that much cause my settings are so basic I don't need awesome sauce features just fuel, spark and boost

[Big Thurs]

A smoked battery has made life difficult lately for this project. I reinstalled the official version of MT2.25 (instead of the copy with the hires code from extra.co.uk) and with a little ini tweaking here and there MT works again, but the configurator still crashes. That isn't really need, though. Back in the early msextra days, we had to manually edit and place all of the ini files by hand without the configurator.

I suspect there is a lot of vr and ground plane interference from the coil drivers. I disconnected the coil and pulled the plugs and got a nice shot of the tooth log:


When I plug the coil in and crank it I get lots of resets, comm glitches, and rpm misreadings. I will move the coil drivers on to their own heatsink located in the eingine bay and see if that does the trick.

[toyotaspeed90]

not sure what's going on on the right side.....

the tooth log looks like it's reading 35 teeth and a missing tooth..... (yes I counted the lines)....

if the sensor isn't close enough and it tries to fire it may not be reading the teeth correctly.... at least on my EDIS setup the VR sensor is just MM's away from the gear (and I had the gear trued up after it was installed to ensure it wasn't out of alignment)

[328FTW]

Originally Posted by toyotaspeed90

not sure what's going on on the right side.....

Probably as he releases the key and the engine spins down, especially if the plugs are out, there is kinda and exponential increase in the time between teeth like a sudden slowdown (like the starter disengaging)

[campos]

i'm paying close attention to this thread.

i own a 93 5sfe and i just acquired a megasquirt 1 v2.2 pcb that has been upgraded to a megasquirt 2.

[Big Thurs]

Probably as he releases the key and the engine spins down, especially if the plugs are out, there is kinda and exponential increase in the time between teeth like a sudden slowdown (like the starter disengaging)

Bingo. I was hoping it would stay at the previous page, but it caught that last bit after turning the ignition off, probably due to the 6800uF cap on B+.

if the sensor isn't close enough and it tries to fire it may not be reading the teeth correctly.... at least on my EDIS setup the VR sensor is just MM's away from the gear (and I had the gear trued up after it was installed to ensure it wasn't out of alignment)

The EDIS modules have been tested with an extremely wide range of gaps by one of the msefi members. I dont know whats in those magical modules, but the vr filtering/processing is far superior to ms which is why my previous setup used the module. On that setup, it seemed the happiest at 4-5mm.

Big time success!!! It started and ran quite well despite the coolant temp being about 25*F off. It didn't hurt that I had a good msq to start from for everything but the wheel decoder and spark settings. Now theres just a few more things to sort out before driving it and buttoning up the harness and case.
Moving the IGBTs outside of the case seemed to do the trick with the vr/comm issues. I put them in a small altoids case which will be mounted on the bracket that holds the stock coil, igniter, etc. I also changed the sparkA and B wires to shielded, as well as the wires from the IGBTs to the coils. The ground for the IGBTs has been moved to the condenser ground on the manifold to prevent spoiling the ground plane in ms as well.

Heres a couple of shots of the current setup. Keep in mind that all the extra wiring will be cleaned up and loomed after verifying that everything works correctly.





Stay tuned!!

[toyotaspeed90]

it's been a while since I touched a V3 board... is that map sensor backwards?

[Big Thurs]

Yeah, since the board is almost all the way at the bottom of the case I had to stick the map sensor on the top side. I remember my first ms2.2 kit came with a plastic bulkhead, and I wish these kits nowadays shipped with them. I would really like one sticking out of the case to prevent tugging on the sensor.

[328FTW]

You could put a joiner just outside the case in line with the hose and pull the 2 vacuum hoses apart that way, leaving a small tail.

[Big Thurs]

Well I drove it for the first time in months, but my driver side fender liner is flapping above 40mph. Not too worried about that, though.

It seems to be running smooth, but my logs show this:


Now its time to debug this problem, and move on to tweaking the closed loop idle control.
I really wished the closed loop idle code was a little more refined before stopping development on ms1-extra (although someone is still working with the HR code). It seems that a common problem with the ms1 closed loop idle control is it decreases the DC until a point, then jumps through the roof and slowly decreases, causing a constantly fluctuating idle.

[Big Thurs]

I did some tooth loggin today and found something interesting...
Every time I watched the tooth logger live on the screen, it looked consistent as shown here:


But after closely examining the log in MLV, I saw two things happening occasionally:
1) My missing tooth is...um...missing sometimes The marker line towards the right is where the missing tooth should be on that cycle
2)There is sometimes an extra missing tooth. Look at the closely spaced spikes towards the left on the shot below.
The plan now is to play with the VR gap. I'm currently gapped at ~2mm. I also tried adjusting the pots with no change so far.



I also installed megatunix and can't wait to use it again. I haven't used it in years and did not know that it now has a tooth logger. (not to mention it works properly in winxp since I hardly use my linux laptop anymore)

[Big Thurs]

I haven't had much time to do much work on the car lately, but it runs great after weeks of trying to figure out the problem. Long story short, during the "getting it to crank" period of the install I messed upthe wheel decoder settings and my trigger B was a tooth off, causing strange sync loss issues.
Then the oil pressure light came on after driving it to work to do an alignment on it. Turns out it was the oil filter causing the low pressure...but I digest...
Once I get the stereo sorted out it will be back on the road and almost ready for some tuning.