Fred's firmware development diary

[Fred]

Yeah, that's about right, the last things we were working on were:

RB / SR / LT1 decoders
XGATE VSS and bit bang

And all of that some years ago now.

There are still a handful of people using the system, intermittent drivers, more than daily:

ToxicTacoma
DeuceEFI
My 16v 244 Volvo and Hotel Hyundai and others planned and already set up etc - ute and KP included
John sometimes, but he has the car "dual booted" with a Lunk ECU from his brethren in chch who developed it.
Rob's R33 though it rarely moves

Challenges:

The world moved on. And by that I mean containers are now an essential part of any activity on this system since much of the software is not buildable with the latest of this or that.

Similar for GUI tools, you need outdated Linux to build them except my Java stuff.

Even my Java stuff has suffered though I did do some upgrades, more is necessary. I tweaked the build process to use a non-default Java to work around it short term.

Though no work has been done for a few years the project is as it was and remains usable for those with desire, time, and effort.

I now own about 30 cars give or take, and some absolute awesome ones amongst them. Most are destined to run FreeEMS at some point. The next in line is an 88 Volvo 760 Turbo that I have 16v swapped - it'll literally share the ECU with the hotel and Volvo 244 - it'll share the tune/setup/firmware, perhaps with a different offset, with the 244 too.

I've been having a hell of a time with intermittent cylinder dropping on my Volvo 960 wagon, so that's on the cards too just to get it reliable/usable as it's been pretty idle despite the awesome setup on it due to the ECU/ignition issues.

What's still a weakness:

Firmware: The best version is a semi-private hodge podge of various branches that are not prime time ready merged into one mess and run by various people. Still needs each finishing and merging and the rest rebasing until their time comes. I still run the gitlab HEAD on the 244 though, that's the dog food car.

Tuning: it was always meh, there is a hard-to-build EMStudio version that Rob and I spent some time fixing a bunch of stuff on that we use when we want such a thing. There is log analysis auto tune from John.

Logging: my ULV binary with some flags is the best choice due to the way it interrogates the ECU - better than what EMStudio provides, though each have their pros/cons.

Firmware loading: my UL binary is hands down the best - not really a weakness - pretty awesome, but proprietary and that's not cool to rely on exclusively.

Log viewing: Same deal, my ULV is probably the best, though OLV still trumps it in some ways, ULV needs love. OLV also needs love, it'd be good to keep a free option (beer and speech) up to spec, but the OLV code was pretty rotten last I recall. Not that the ULV code was ever great, but there are some awesome tricks in there that make it efficient and fast and precise.

Apologies for the necrophilia.

This site and this user and this project are not going away, ever, if I can help it. <3

Kind regards, your fearless leader, Fred :-)