5 December 2009
Session 318 - Ride height adjustment
As stated last month I have had the catalytic convertors installed and they have eaten into the ground clearance. So today I tweaked up the car to reclaim my lost ground clearance, well for now anyway.
Photo of catalytic convertor on one side underneath the car showing the reduced ground clearance
After a few turns of the adjustable suspension.
Now I need to revisit my camber angle at the front and the headlamp alignment.
31 December 2009
Session 319 - Megasquirt upgrade
Not strictly tangible work on the Westfield. Feeling too cold in the garage. Feeling duty bound to make at least one post before the end of 2009! I was always intending on upgrading my Megasquirt ECU to the latest stable version. I am using MS1 PCB version 3.0. There is an upgrade path which of course. I checked this before I commited to buy the ECU in the first place. The upgrade basically entails removing the CPU from the 40pin socket on the ECU and inserting a daughterboard which simply plugs into the socket. I have the daughterboard to do this upgrade now but resisting doing this prior to the IVA test.
Daugher board looks like:
Remove ECU and replace with motherboard. This converts processor from older 8-bit to full 16-bit technology. The daughterboard also provides hardwire to drive stepper motor driven idle control valves.
Full conversion instructions are provided on the MSextra site here. Some of the extra features provided in MS2extra are documented here.
MSextra is a branched version of the orginal B&G code. MS1extra for MS1 and MS2extra for MS2. MSextra provides additional features over the B&G code and supported by a forum community here.
A good website for getting Megasquirt related supplies, support, downloads and help here. This site is ran by Philip Ringwood and is recommended. It provides very good documentation above and beyond the standard B&G set.
Some of the key advanges that MS2 provides over the MS1 processor. Running MS2extra and MS1extra respectively:
- Stepper Motor Idle valve (4 wired)
- Can bus comms!
- 16x16 fuel table
- 16x16 ignition map
- 12x12 AFR targets
- Fuel resolution down to 0.16 micro-seconds
- RPM resolution down to 1RPM
- Sequential fuel firing
- Enhanced Acceleration Enrichment (wall wetting)
- Support of standard timing sensors for standard cars
- Coolant temperature based rev limit
Many more for full comparsion between MS1 and MS2 see here and here
I downloaded the CD for MS2-Extra Release V2.1.0 of the MSextra site discussed above. Download here
This download is very useful because it contains everything you need. The firmare, Megatune used to configure and program the ECU, the documentation, etc.
I reviewed my current MSextra tune configuration and started a new MS2extra tune. This took me a couple of nights. lots of new things. During the course of this I discovered that one feature had been removed! This feature which was present in MS1extra allows trim of the ignition timing for the EDIS trigger wheel. You may recall that the trigger wheel has to be installed with the missing tooth at 50BTDC in relation to the VR sensor. The closes I could get my wheel to this was 60BTDC so ideally I needed to use a trim of -10degrees. However MS1extra would only allow -9 which was close enough. This feature had been pulled for MS2extra, Without this trim feature I cannot use MS2extra. I made an appeal to one of the main developers of MS2extra and 1 hour later he had agreed to put it back in and created a new release and this was at 1:30am! Not that's service. This change is not general release so can be found here on my site in the meantime.
Unfortunately megatune cannot work with the later versions of MS2extra as it cannot cope with the complexity! However, a solution is at hand. TunerStudio beta is now available which replaces megatune and will cope with the added complexity. TunerStudio begins together a number of features which could only be achieve with three separate packages: megatune, megalog viewer and vexme. TunerStudio was re-developed in Java and it's the future. Its also developed by one of the developers of the MSExtra forum so compatibility is assured. This can be downloaded from the official website here.
I really like TunerStudio not only does it prvoide a one-stop shop but the guage layout is completely configurable with gauges pre-configured for every variable. Acess to the tuning configuration is much nicer also. It also has several useful tools/wizards one of which is the Trigger Wizzard:
Here's a screenshot of my TunerStudio project with gauges setup for my purpose. You can set all the limits on the gauges. You have various styles of gauges, buttons and sliders etc.
One of the tuning tools show below:
Happy new year!
Go to January 2010