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DIY Fuel injection thread.


yoeddynz

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come on, we are in the DIY fuel injection thread, this is about testing shit and learning, and theoretically not paying people to do stuff on your car

 

and megasquirts are great, I have had minimal problems with mine, I just had some good knowledgeable dudes help me with it

 

Also, this stuff is actually fairly complicated, no matter what an experienced person tells you, and requires hours upon hours of research and faffing around, with probably the wrong bits giving you the wrong info, but thats all parts of the learning experience innit

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I guess that echos a conversation that was had last night amongst some friends. 

If you don't know anything about tuning, don't want to learn, don't have the time or simply don't care and just want to pay some money and get a running car asap then great, link/haltech/etc/etc have you covered 

But 

That doesn't mean that every car with any variant of megasquirt is going to suffer a failure. If link offered their ecus in kitset you'd see similar issues. 

That said I know the early gen megasquirt (like I'm running) are significantcantly older tech and you do have to take some further precautions to look after the ecu. 

There are more than a few success stories even just here on oldschool, it's just people comparing a link g4+ to a megasquirt 1 which pisses me and alot of others off. 

 

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15 hours ago, BlownCorona said:

He bashes on megasquirt like you wouldn't belive, yet has never owned one. Just read stories online and 'has mates who blew up their engine cause of megasquirt' 

I had another vehicle a few years ago with a Megasquirt 1 powering a 1UZ.. and it ran that shit flawlessly.

I certainly have nothing against the megasquirt hardware or tuning software, hell I still have a license for Tunerstudio.

But when the one tuner that advertises tuning Megasquirts has tuned a good friends MX5s that blew up shortly after.  It kindof puts me off.

While I'll be trying to road tune it myself, I know what I don't know. And tuning for ITBs seems like quite the fuckaround, so it'd be nice to take it somewhere reputable for an hour or 2 of dyno time to sort out any issues and to make sure I don't ping the motor to death.

 

That being said I can get a plug & play Megasquirt for the right price, I have knowledge of the tuning software, and the whole point of going down this path was to learn more about tuning a vehicle from scratch.    

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32 minutes ago, linearentropy said:

 

But when the one tuner that advertises tuning Megasquirts has tuned a good friends MX5s that blew up shortly after.  It kindof puts me off.

 

What was the actual failure? Because anyone could program any ecu, or build an engine with an error and cause a failure. 

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I mean come on.. Ring lands blow because the engine is running too much boost for the ring gap. 

The rings expand due to the extra heat, the gap closes up and the ring has nowhere to go but up, therefor breaking the piston. 

My car is only on 3psi of boost untill I take the engine appart to specifically open the ring gap for this exact reason. 

I'm guessing your mate chucked 15-20 psi at an otherwise stock motor? Mx5 engines are pretty stout and will take that, but I'd always be looking at opening the ring gap for boost 

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I've done close to 20,000 km (14 months) with my microsquirt so far. The only ecu caused issue I had was when a resistor burnt out in the first 5 seconds of operation, but that is a known common fault with them and takes all of 5 mins to repair. There are people out there that have done 300,000+ km/10 years without any issues using megasquirts - in harsh environments like off-roading too.

All other faults were my own doing (like the loom being melted on the exhaust manifold on day 1 or my injectors leaking (don't use old injectors)).

That being said, I'm still running it in a fuel-only mode so it is a fairly basic setup. It is all wired and ready to go for as soon as I want to set up ECU controlled ignition, just need to stick a CAS on the flywheel but I don't feel like doing it at the moment.

 

The other day I started the car with the MAP sensor plumbed to free air instead of the manifold (I forgot to reconnect it after dealing with an exhaust leak) and the car actually ran, albeit way too rich and super lumpy. I would have thought it would have just flooded and not ran at all. Took a minute or two before I diagnosed the problem.

 

 

 

 

/If I did it again I would probably just design and build my own ECU from scratch for my specific application, or just fall for the marketeering and get a link. But there isn't really anything wrong with megasquirts. I probably saved about a grand by doing microsquirt compared to a link atom.

 

 

Also, stay away from Innovate LC-2 controllers for oxygen sensors. They seem to have a fairly poor reputation. The 14point7 or whatnot are supposedly good?

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Playing with, building and tuning my Speeduino was awesome. Grass Roots ECU at its best. Links are great, but more a chequebook setup than megasquirt etc. Nothing wrong with that but not really what diy is about. 

I have another Speeduino sitting here waiting for another project. 

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23 minutes ago, BlownCorona said:

I mean come on.. Ring lands blow because the engine is running too much boost for the ring gap. 

The rings expand due to the extra heat, the gap closes up and the ring has nowhere to go but up, therefor breaking the piston. 

My car is only on 3psi of boost untill I take the engine appart to specifically open the ring gap for this exact reason. 

I'm guessing your mate chucked 15-20 psi at an otherwise stock motor? Mx5 engines are pretty stout and will take that, but I'd always be looking at opening the ring gap for boost 

I know what you're saying, I dont know enough about what happened and I certainly don't want to argue.   From what I know, it was the power level that the tuner suggested for a 1.8L MX5 engine.. 220hp atw.

 

13 minutes ago, ajg193 said:

Also, stay away from Innovate LC-2 controllers for oxygen sensors. They seem to have a fairly poor reputation. The 14point7 or whatnot are supposedly good?

I'll be using the 14point7 spartan, so should be sweet on that one.

 

3 minutes ago, kws said:

Playing with, building and tuning my Speeduino was awesome. Grass Roots ECU at its best. Links are great, but more a chequebook setup than megasquirt etc. Nothing wrong with that but not really what diy is about. 

I've been following Speeduino for some time.  Its certainly a cool project, but again I know what I cant do, and assembly of a board is one of those things.  

Ya'll have made me reconsider going down the (prebuilt) megasquirt route.  I'll need to have another rethink of what to do.

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Tunerstudio is super easy to learn the basics, and for MS there are soooo many tutorials and forum posts that almost everything has been covered at some point. 

I'd say go for it, personally. 

Just as an aside, Speeduino is now available as a prebuilt board

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1 hour ago, kws said:

Playing with, building and tuning my Speeduino was awesome. Grass Roots ECU at its best. Links are great, but more a chequebook setup than megasquirt etc. Nothing wrong with that but not really what diy is about. 

True, this thread has been a general catch-all for EFI related stuff. 

Shall we partition out non DIY ECU type stuff to elsewhere? 

In my mind tuning your own ECU etc is DIY as it's often been a thing most people consider just in the domain of tuners.

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On 25/11/2018 at 12:31, Lith said:

There are some stories of skullduggery which could explain some similarities in the software between Links and Emtrons, but like it or not the Emtron is a different product from a different brand and a definite level up from the Link...  while Vipec being "very much a Link" is actually because they are Links.

Oh lots of Skullduggery - Pretty sure Ray Hall who originally released the Vipec was heavily involved in the EMTRON

Appears to be a few new brands filtering over here as well now from Europe and America now, specially, MAXX ECU and FUELTECH

 

 

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5 hours ago, linearentropy said:

tuning for ITBs seems like quite the fuckaround, so it'd be nice to take it somewhere reputable for an hour or 2 of dyno time to sort out any issues and to make sure I don't ping the motor to death

Nah its a piece of cake with ITB.

IMO punching in numbers into fuel and ignition tables is the easiest part, tuning full throotle is the easiest part.

A big part of the time people pay to a tuner is all the background config.

A car with less than say 300hp is super easy to road tune because you can do some full load pulls without it being dangerous or high speed.

A dyno is a great tool and its main advantage is that its a shitload quicker.

I gained nothing on dyno session vs my road/track tuning efforts.

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34 minutes ago, Roman said:

great stuff 

A car with less than say 300hp is super easy to road tune because you can do some full load pulls without it being dangerous or high speed.

Not much risk of high speeds in a mx5.

16 minutes ago, Yowzer said:

When 10-5 first got his ITB EFI setup running on his skyline we tuned it in the Taupo Motorsport carpark about half an hour before he took it on the track. I think he ran that tune for a couple of years without touching it haha

Thats good to hear.  The main thread that I'd been basing my info off of made it seem like it was quite a challenge. 

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It can be tricky because the airflow vs throttle angle is massively non linear, so if you have an ECU where you cant set custom  cell divisions for your load axis then you're a bit stuffed. But that hasnt really been the case for any ECU in the last 10+ years.

Like you might want way finer resolution between say 1-5% throttle and then not much between 50-100.

Or otherwise if people are trying to run it solely as a map sensor based tune then you're pretty much pushing shit uphill because theres not much vacuum.

Again its one of those things where the initial configuration before the car ever hits the rollers is the big decider of whether or not it's going to tune well and stay decent in varying conditions after that.

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Here's a question. 

Your comment on cell devisions reminded me that I had originally set up all the devisions square, and like you say now I'd prefer to have them tailors a bit more. 

Is there a way to change the divisions that also moves your current map around, or is it a case of having to do it all manually and somewhat re tune? 

 

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