Another Bad Wideband You Shouldn't Buy :-/

[Fred]

This youtube video is remarkable! I suggest you click the dislike button. I simply can not believe that someone would post that video for the purpose of promotion. The "test pipe", as another youtube commenter says, is nothing short of horrific. I'd be surprised if anyone would buy the product after watching that, however if someone does, and I find out that they dare to connect it to a FreeEMS unit, I'll offer that person exactly no support for their FreeEMS experience. What a fucking joke. I took some screen shots to save you the trouble of watching the vid... it's 20 mins long and a complete waste of time.

Time stamp takes you to the pipe, and past all of the pointless unboxing crap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... 03g#t=776s













That's some of the ugliest welding that I've ever seen! Remarkable. The nut they supply with the unit is NOT a bung, it's JUST a nut, and totally inappropriate for mounting in a high performance exhaust stream.

This shot of the display board appears to show auto-routed vias. Look at the messy shambles. What a disgrace.






Then, in that probably-leaky "test pipe" there is a discrepancy in the values! Surprise! The ingress of gas is at one end of the tube, close to one sensor, far from the other, there is no flow, there were no homogeneity measures taken. Horrible.






Finally, I'd really like to know who Rick B is! The guy in the video? Good thing he didn't show his face too.






End rant.

Fred.

[flat4power]

ouch the "test pipe"

[Joseph Davis]

Fred is just angry that he can't dance to that funky beat.

Rick B = Ricky B of Silicone Hoses/MR2/Hydra Nemesis fame? Ricky B - if that is who it is - is an interesting dude... those standalones went from running engines well but having comm issues that bricked them (when Ricky B said they couldn't be bricked that way. On three different boxes) to running engines well and not bricking. I asked him a year ago to lower batt comp table below 10v to help with startup, he replied that there was no need as the standalone would shut off if the voltage went below 10v. Which kinda demonstrates how out of touch he is - this sloppy intellectual behavior is how he could design his first wideband, compare it to the Innovate, and "know" that the Innovate unit was wrong. Anyone who's ever met Klaus of Innovate knows otherwise, Klaus is as anal retentive and paranoid-perfectionist about his gear as they come.

[Fred]

Definitely jealous about the dancing thing. Actually, when I played it in bed this morning while the wife was getting ready to go to work, she stuck her head out of the bathroom and, paraphrasing, said "What the hell is that shit that you're listening to at this time of the morning?" :-)

LOL @ 10V, FreeEMS is good down to (below?) 6V, possibly as low as 5V if you're uber lucky.

Fred.

[Joseph Davis]

So is Nemesis. The main power caps float the chips for the instants the starter runs up against a compression stroke, you can clearly log battery voltage below 10v...

[Fred]

Almost any shoddy system should work down to about 7V. For the caps to float anything there must be a series diode and they must be big enough on the 12V side of the regulator to supply the device for the duration of the transient. But yes, point made, to not realise this you'd have to be pretty dense.

[toalan]

I have 2 of these units, i got two because I could not believe the result of the first one, the 2nd unit confirmed the results of the first unit.

I know how it is to start out, I wish him the best of luck. If anyone is interested in my results, they can pm me.

Fred, try to get a hold of the guy and invite him to the thread. I tried calling this company many times and kept getting voicemail. I have alot of questions for him that I would like answers to.

[Fred]

A little bit of prodding around:

https://www.apsx.com/
http://betterpartx.com/
http://www.wide-band.com/
http://www.facebook.com/bpsx.wideband

APSX, LLC.
9435 Waterstone Blvd. Suite 140
Cincinnati, OH 45249



Google maps fits with this image. I was surprised that it did, actually.

Fred.

[toalan]

I contacted Rick B via email, I told him my results, I offered to purchase another unit off him already setup and tested by him for additional money (basically I wanted a plug and play ready to run unit, so to take out any error on my part) and I received no response from him, that was about a week to 2 weeks ago.

Now I am fairly certain that this Rock B guy does not care about putting out a quality product of any sort so I feel no remorse for what I am about to write.

I got my first unit in March/April, I ran his unit against my 0.8 lambda test gas (11.78 AFR for gasoline), the unit showed max rich ~7.xx AFR. The instructions are practically non existent, and perhaps I made a mistake doing the free air calibration. I mostly thought the unit was defective as I know how the sensor should be controlled and when I scope the sensor signals it is obvious to me that the sensor is not remotely in the ballpark of being correctly controlled.

So then I bought a 2nd unit, I got someone else to order it for me as perhaps he figured out who I am and purposely sabotaged the first unit (probably more paranoia than warranted but the result of the first unit was so bad that it begged some outlandish reasoning in my mind). The 2nd unit behaved exactly like the first unit, 7.xx AFR with 11.78 lab gas, scope traces of the sensor signals were roughly the same as the first one, so either both units are defective or both units are behaving as it is designed to behave. User error on my part is still possible which is why I emailed him and offered to pay extra for a pretested and ready to run unit.

In total I probably spent more time and money testing his unit than Rick B has spent on designing and testing his product.

I could write a whole book on the problems with this product; PCB, enclosure, instructions, wiring, circuit protection, etc.... If anyone wants to know how to design a good product they should buy this wideband and do the total opposite of what rick B does.

In summary; If you took a piece of paper, wrote "14.7" on it and taped it to your dash board, it will be more accurate than the BPSX wideband.

[masterkorp]

Those welds look made by my nieces. They're 7.