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DIY Fuel injection thread.


yoeddynz

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7 hours ago, BlownCorona said:

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. 

I think this is a very relevant point to why MS has a bad rep. 
You cant compare factory based manufacturing and QC processes to some dude in a garage with a soldering iron. (no offence intended to any dudes in garages with soldering irons)
No big manufacturers offer ECU as kitset because they'd probably receive a similar level of criticism for failures, which often  just come down to something out of control of the company.
Regardless of who causes the fault, it damages the brand.

If you're a tuner and you need to be quoting jobs and hoping to make some profit at the end.
It only takes 1 or 2 megasquirt jobs where you spend hours and hours  chasing a ghost because of poor assembly or similar. 
To just get to the point where you say "okay fuck this" and just avoid them.
Which I think is the point that a lot of tuners have reached already, based on some historical MS setups that were a far cry from what's currently available.
Id imagine most tuners arent electronics experts prepared to diagnose internal ECU faults.

And megasquirt itself has gone through a bit of a transformation from being completely open source to locking things down a bit and actually selling assembled products and so on. Possibly relating to reasons above. 

So in some ways its present day reputation is undeserved considering a modern prebuilt MS3 seems pretty legit, as much as most other things.
The number of people running Megasquirt plug&play for MX5s in America is staggering, its like they established market dominance and now it's just the community go-to. If there were systemic issues with it, there would be a lot more foot stamping than there currently is.
 

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1 hour ago, BlownCorona said:

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? 

 

It automatically rescales with megasquirt

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1 hour ago, Roman said:

I think this is a very relevant point to why MS has a bad rep. 
You cant compare factory based manufacturing and QC processes to some dude in a garage with a soldering iron. (no offence intended to any dudes in garages with soldering irons)
No big manufacturers offer ECU as kitset because they'd probably receive a similar level of criticism for failures, which often  just come down to something out of control of the company.
Regardless of who causes the fault, it damages the brand.

If you're a tuner and you need to be quoting jobs and hoping to make some profit at the end.
It only takes 1 or 2 megasquirt jobs where you spend hours and hours  chasing a ghost because of poor assembly or similar. 
To just get to the point where you say "okay fuck this" and just avoid them.
Which I think is the point that a lot of tuners have reached already, based on some historical MS setups that were a far cry from what's currently available.
Id imagine most tuners arent electronics experts prepared to diagnose internal ECU faults.

And megasquirt itself has gone through a bit of a transformation from being completely open source to locking things down a bit and actually selling assembled products and so on. Possibly relating to reasons above. 

So in some ways its present day reputation is undeserved considering a modern prebuilt MS3 seems pretty legit, as much as most other things.
The number of people running Megasquirt plug&play for MX5s in America is staggering, its like they established market dominance and now it's just the community go-to. If there were systemic issues with it, there would be a lot more foot stamping than there currently is.
 

Diagnosing circuit boards is an art, need to have full access to the board and circuit diagrams and then understand what the circuits are trying to achieve, add to that test equipment to generate signals/voltages and read outputs to really do a decent job, thats $100/hr territory, 2-3 hours just to set up and confirm a fault rapidly hacks into kitset price or a new factory ECU. 

For me I like building circuits, and then troubleshooting is good fun, bugger having to charge for the time though.

 

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3 hours ago, NickJ said:

Diagnosing circuit boards is an art, need to have full access to the board and circuit diagrams and then understand what the circuits are trying to achieve, add to that test equipment to generate signals/voltages and read outputs to really do a decent job, thats $100/hr territory, 2-3 hours just to set up and confirm a fault rapidly hacks into kitset price or a new factory ECU. 

For me I like building circuits, and then troubleshooting is good fun, bugger having to charge for the time though.

 

Can confirm diagnosing board issues is a total fuck around. My 0.4 Speeduino board had issues with the ground plane not being connected to certain pins on the board, so i spent ages tracing everything back and soldering in extra jumpers to fix it.

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On 23/11/2018 at 17:11, Lith said:

I've been quietly lurking this thread for ages, haven't really had much to add but definitely have to agree with all this from what I've seen so far.
 

Someone buy one and tell us how they go ;)  I don't have an appropriate car myself....

Problem solved. Lets us know how you get on....

https://www.trademe.co.nz/motors/used-cars/vauxhall/auction-1839456347.htm?rsqid=7a0bfe554c7145dc803f05e438d9bfd0

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On 23/11/2018 at 18:46, linearentropy said:

 

Unfortunately if you ask about them on the nz mx5 facebook pages you'll find that theres only really a couple of people in NZ that bother to tune them, and theres a lot of people with blown motors who wouldnt recommend going to said tuners after learning the hard way.

I would have to quip in and say that any 'real tuner' who is worth is salt should be able to tune a car with MS. The tuning program, Tunerstudio, is such a piece of piss to use and it would be very easy to make the required changes needed to various tables or other settings whilst the car is on a rolling road.

But I think the problem is that often the very same people who 'go budget' and fit an MS are the same people who cut corners and install it terribly and the tuner may well end up going in circles because of the poor installation- which shouldnt be the case with off the shelf plug'n'play models.

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1 hour ago, yoeddynz said:

which shouldnt be the case with off the shelf plug'n'play models.

Must have been on the same wavelength this morning.   Woke up dazed and confused after way too few drinks last night and impulse ordered a MS3Pro powered PNP after realising the cheap Links dont have knock control.  Its way overkill (for now), but its a stamped board not hand soldered and cost about the same as a Link Monsoon + harness.

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On 26/11/2018 at 18:17, BlownCorona said:

reeeeeeaaaaalllllyyy??

cool ill have to have a play. havnt noticed it rescale before

So turns out megasquirt can rescale the map if you decide you want to move the bin divisions around! i never noticed this button

image.png.b0a62b00e74eafe681d08e3b9c5504fd.png

and once youve made your changes

image.png.85588ba1a6228db0b014653ca9399994.png

seems to work great! will have to figure out how i want it layed out now. 

currently its all just even. and as you can see above. runs all the way out to 8000! as if my engine is gonna pull that. id put off rescaling it cause i thought it would be a massive manual task. 

any suggestions for how the map (y) axis should be arranged? supercharged engine which will run out to 0.5 bar eventually 

 

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I changed to extra bins around the idle through to midrange areas because it was where I would and did notice the most differences.  Then from about 4000 upwards I spread them apart further.  Ditto for the Vac side of the tables.

If this is what you mean?

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On ‎22‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 13:07, Roman said:

You could offload some of the IO to canbus on the Atom.

Like it might be more cost effective to buy an Atom + Can wideband than a Monsoon + analog wideband. 

Canbus is like the secret back door, on top of the predefined things you can send to ECU over can you can also have 8 virtual analog inputs and 8 virtual digital inputs. 
Then use an Arduino Mega or something to give yourself a whole bunch of 0-5v inputs and switches etc.

Which is an absolute shit load above the 3 analog inputs and 2 digital inputs it comes with standard! 

And that you can output essentially as much as you want from the ECU as well.

 

 

I dunno, I think if you counted your time it would be easily cheaper to just buy the ecu with more I/O to start with. It's one of those things where when you have don't it and your more or less repeating a setup you have done before you might say yeah I can make a saving this way plug it together and know it will work easily. but when you haven't done it before and you have to spend several full days (when you add up your research time etc.) not a chance. I mean if you want to learn canbus stuff then that's the learning budget so maybe fine. but people sure love to say oh you can do it this way and save so much and 99.99% of the time its a load of bollocks.

 

On ‎23‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 18:09, kws said:

One thing i need to ask if youre buying an ECU, is what is the preferred ECU for your tuner? You dont want to end up with an ECU your tuner doesnt want to work with, unless you're prepared to travel or tune it yourself.

my experience is that its not tuners not wanting to tune megasquirts, its tuners not wanting to deal with dodgy installs that have all sorts of other problems when you taken them to the dyno. been there done that and seen mates setups have the same issue.

on top of that, just being less familiar with them it will invariably take more time vs using software or doing troubleshooting on something they work with very often.

to be fair the prices have definitely come closer with the link atom and monsoon now, when you factor in shipping GST and customs plus the additional features the links have in some cases you are talking a few hundred dollars. if that means your car gets started and tuned in half the time that's probably worthwhile.

On ‎24‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 23:39, peteretep said:

wat, just tune it yourself, its not that hard

this is really the case, provided you are so inclined and interested in learning this kind of stuff.

because of the diy nature of megasquirt its all about the installation being done well and troubleshooted well on setup/startup. which you have to do and fuck up a few things to learn how to do it right really.

there a are a few naff things about them but none that make them dangerous to your engine any more than other potential failure modes

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Still waiting on the chinese oxy sensor.

 

Meanwhile, BNT reckons they provide a 1yr/30000km warranty on the LSU 4.9 sensors. But they do cost significantly more than from NZefi ($210 for 0.85 m cable sensor vs $160) - NZefi provides no warranty.

 

No idea if BNT would be able to honour the warranty or if Bosch would just tell them to bugger off though.

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10 hours ago, Testament said:

 

I dunno, I think if you counted your time it would be easily cheaper to just buy the ecu with more I/O to start with. It's one of those things where when you have don't it and your more or less repeating a setup you have done before you might say yeah I can make a saving this way plug it together and know it will work easily. but when you haven't done it before and you have to spend several full days (when you add up your research time etc.) not a chance. I mean if you want to learn canbus stuff then that's the learning budget so maybe fine. but people sure love to say oh you can do it this way and save so much and 99.99% of the time its a load of bollocks.

 

my experience is that its not tuners not wanting to tune megasquirts, its tuners not wanting to deal with dodgy installs that have all sorts of other problems when you taken them to the dyno. been there done that and seen mates setups have the same issue.

on top of that, just being less familiar with them it will invariably take more time vs using software or doing troubleshooting on something they work with very often.

to be fair the prices have definitely come closer with the link atom and monsoon now, when you factor in shipping GST and customs plus the additional features the links have in some cases you are talking a few hundred dollars. if that means your car gets started and tuned in half the time that's probably worthwhile.

this is really the case, provided you are so inclined and interested in learning this kind of stuff.

because of the diy nature of megasquirt its all about the installation being done well and troubleshooted well on setup/startup. which you have to do and fuck up a few things to learn how to do it right really.

there a are a few naff things about them but none that make them dangerous to your engine any more than other potential failure modes

A+ rant. 


 

6 hours ago, ajg193 said:

Still waiting on the chinese oxy sensor.

 

Meanwhile, BNT reckons they provide a 1yr/30000km warranty on the LSU 4.9 sensors. But they do cost significantly more than from NZefi ($210 for 0.85 m cable sensor vs $160) - NZefi provides no warranty.

 

No idea if BNT would be able to honour the warranty or if Bosch would just tell them to bugger off though.


Probably only for factory fitment?

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