J-series Acura/Honda

[Fred]

OK, OLV does have issues, as well as the dodgy file format:

http://issues.freeems.org/view.php?id=515

Bed! Can we chat somehow, gmail, skype, aim, msn, irc, phone call, google talk, whatever. It'd be good to go over what you're going to need to do.

Fred.

[Peter]

So I just took a gander at the logs in notepad, and there are some fairly large jumps in RPM between the lines for what I would expect the sampling rate to be. Around 4k not so much at lower RPMs.

You're going to be feature hungry... && appears to be not working very well...

I have a solution to both of these problems. I need to start writing and testing some code.

It's SO slow to load the bigger ones,

Do you want a small file at a higher RPM?

Can we chat somehow, gmail, skype, aim, msn, irc, phone call, google talk, whatever. It'd be good to go over what you're going to need to do.

Ya, I generally have a fair amount of free time Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. My first thought is that I need to try and get crank_with_cam_sync working.
I'm pretty patient, and the car still runs so don't feel like I'm rushing you.

[Fred]

The short log shows some variance in arrival of pulses at higher rpm too, so it might be going wild. Is the belt tensioned correctly? It looks as though using cam only is not good enough for ignition, at a first glance anyway.

I couldn't sleep, so here I am posting again.

I was dreaming about your patterns and came up with a scheme to use the crank one, however it will need thorough testing as it's not a 100% certain way to do things. If the cam belt slops enough, and you get a sync loss while at higher RPM, then you're screwed when you resync, as you might resync on the wrong spot.

Let's try to talk on Saturday before you write any code.

Fred.

[Peter]

The short log shows some variance in arrival of pulses at higher rpm too, so it might be going wild. Is the belt tensioned correctly? It looks as though using cam only is not good enough for ignition, at a first glance anyway.

The last engine I had in this car died, because the timing belt tensioner died. So it has about 4k on the timing belt, pulleys, water pump, and tensioner. I really hope it doesn't have a problem. I was thinking about cutting a tooth off the crank to make it an 11-1, but I have two problems with that idea: I'll pretty much have to pull the engine to get it done, and I doubt that the oem ecu would let it run until I finished this ecu.

Let's try to talk on Saturday before you write any code.

I think I'm going to try and start with Freeems-0.0.1 and follow the development up the line so that I can understand what's going on a little better. Since trying to jump in the middle of of 0.1.1 is a little too high level for me.

[Fred]

I don't want you to modify your crank wheel, that defeats the purpose of the modular decoder setup. I may want you to order another 9926 and a logic gate, though.

I'm not saying your belt has a problem, I'm just saying that there is definitely some forward and back lash in the cam wheel that we are reading, non existent at idle and significant by the time 2k comes around. It could be a normal amount, but other cam driven setups I've played with didn't seem to have that. Don't panic in any case; I'm purely speculating.

Maybe it's time for a "this is how it works" diagram that ignores all the parts that don't matter. I could explain the firmware to you over the phone in a few minutes, it's fairly straight forward in most ways, just not to follow in code due to the interrupt driven nature of it. At the least, you should get some solid laughs from that early code. I bet it's naive and useless. Entropy was close to useable, I guess, and anything up from there.

I look forward to speaking with you.

Fred.

[Peter]

I may want you to order another 9926 and a logic gate, though.

I actually have another MAX chip, because I'd never soldered anything that small so I figured I might need a practice chip to solder on. I'll have to run down to Radio Shack today to see if they have any and gates, assuming the Ravage trickery circuit is the one you're talking about.

Don't panic in any case; I'm purely speculating.

I'm not. I was just expressing my distaste for that being a problem.

At the least, you should get some solid laughs from that early code.

Sounds like a good place to start playing with the code.

I look forward to speaking with you.

I don't really have any good questions to ask you. What should I focus my time on next is about it.

I was dreaming about your patterns ...

I don't want to insult you, because I appreciate your endless hours of work on this project, but I feel like I should make fun of you for this.

[Fred]

Don't worry about giving me shit, as long as it's in a fun way, it's fine. If you want to see examples of not fun, look at Motofab's posts... He hasn't logged in in months, though, and I don't miss him a bit. Perfect! :-)

Re the call, I have some thing to tell you, so questions or not, we should speak.

I was talking about the trickery circuit, however don't rush on that, I think the following should be the game plan:

1) Get a good binary log (3 or 4x the resolution over CSV ones) out of the thing using whatever means you need to (I use cutecom).
2) If that checks out well enough, setup the code and the board for sensors and semi sequential injection
3) Get used to MegaTunix and OLV, whinge to Dave and Ben, put a rough fuel-only tune on it, fine tune circuits and config
4) Build the special circuit, work with me to get a functional decoder in place with enough accuracy for ignition timing
5) Switch to ignition only or switch to full control with (pseudo?)wasted spark and semi sequential (or dizzy and semi sequential)
6) Complain about and beg for various features, including:
7) Upgrade to Sean's code and run full sequential and COP.

That sequence will take some months all together, especially part 7 which isn't ready yet, and won't be for a while, and won't be official for a while after that. I expect part 7 to be part of the official code before the end of the year, though, that's for sure.

I look forward to your dreaming humour! Half of FreeEMS code was written while asleep, on paper, in odd places, doing odd things. You might also get a laugh out of this: d561c3c83d7d741a1a8303fcfb5d2cdb50eaebfc

Fred.

[Peter]

Don't worry about giving me shit, as long as it's in a fun way, it's fine.

I was thinking something along the lines of: Well at least we know what you dream about when you're laying in bed with your wife.

look at Motofab's posts...

Seeing where he's from pretty much explains that.
EDIT:

5) Switch to ignition only or switch to full control

I had no real desire to run the ignition off this board, but if you want me to for testing we could defiantly do that.

[Fred]

Whether you do fuel or ign or both should purely depend on whether the hacked up OEM stuff or FreeEMS stuff works best for each task. It's possible that FreeEMS will work better, but unlikely at this point. It should work and work consistently, though, which OEM stuff doesn't always do.

IE, if your ign is fine on the OEM ECU, and the fueling all wrong, perhaps stick with fuel. Or vice versa, if the ign is too advanced but the fueling is good on the OEM ECU, run ignition. If the OEM does both badly, you can swap both over and do away with it. You have 6 output pins, use them for whatever benefits you the most.

In terms of testing, what I want is people _available_ to test when I make changes. IE, I don't expect people to be daily driving this yet (though 2 are anyway) as it still has a number of known weaknesses. It's frustrating when I make a big change and want to verify it before I move on and no one is free to load the code and report on how it performs. If you can be in that position, it's hugely useful, even if you're not attached to the injectors and just monitoring the would-be outputs on a scope with a real engine signal coming in. You're in an ideal position to do that right now as far as I can tell.

I just added a slow flashing heartbeat output to the SM pin PA6, if you bang an LED and resistor into H2 pin 2 and pin 50 in series, the right way around, they should let you know that your firmware is alive in future. It's not compulsory, though, by any means. Up to you.

Fred.

[Peter]

The fuel map isn't very good right now, and it occasionally does some kind of a soft reset that defiantly cuts the fuel and possibly the ignition.

Right now I don't need a daily driver, but even if I did I have a few other vehicles. I'm kind of surprised you don't have a vehicle setup to test on.

I think I have 16 leds on my board for monitoring stuff, and I've only hooked two of them up to the max chip. It sounds like a good use for one of them. I can't work on it until tonight though.