Secondary logging of AFR

[woj]

Hi all,

First of, sorry for really uninformative subject Second, I am new here Third, I did a fair bit of searching, but so far not found much on this particular subject.

I am in progress of rediscovering TunerPro after the release of the new version. I just finished an adx definition for a Magnetti Marelli IAW 18F(D) family and it works better than I ever expected. What I find really interesting is history tables, and here is what I am getting to. My ECU has only a narrow band lambda and I have an additional module in the car to monitor wide band AFR (Zeitronix Zt-2). A mate of mine works with a similar setup, but his wideband is Innovate.

So what we are after is to log both our ECUs and AFR modules at the same time in Tuner Pro RT. Any suggestions, pointers, ideas are very welcome.

[Mangus]

Hello -

I'm glad this is working well for you so far.

Unfortunately you can't log from mulitple ports at the same time without the use of a custom plug-in to do this work.

I've been thinking through how I could expose such functionality in the "stock" form of TunerPro, but at the end of the day, it would be confusing to the vast majority of users, as the user would need to tie a piece of hardware to a particular COM port number, and when the definition is loaded, they would need to configure the ports that the definition requires to the physical ports on the PC. For advanced users this would be relatively simple. most users (90%+) are not advanced users.

I'm open to hearing how you would envision this working end-to-end, including how it would be exposed to the general user in the user interface.

-Mark

[woj]

Hi Mark,

Well, I am not entirely sure how I would see it done "properly". Being a software developer myself I can see that at some point the usability issues may start popping out, and having multiple DA interfaces and emulators on top of that can lead to lack of control.

But this is only part of the problem, the other is we cannot find Zeitronix or Innovate documentation to even start thinking about logging them.

So we came up with an intermediate solution, we physically "bended" the ECU (there are free ADC channels) to pass the WB 0-5V signal passively through it and out the diagnostics interface in a digital form together with all the other data. This seems to work.

Ha, and now what we started thinking about Have you ever considered some auto-tuning capabilities for Tuner? History tables are a dramatically cool thing, now I can imagine having a corresponding target table and a script that will keep modifying a linked table (and auto-updating the bin image) until the history values are close enough to the target values and on the right side of them too. I also have another similar idea for supporting ignition timing tuning in a dyno-situation, but I do not want to throw too many things at the same time at you

Cheers,

Woj

[Mangus]

Using spare inputs int he ECM are how most people do this. I do have Innovate documentation on their stream, and it too requires a plug-in to be written, because they use a streaming packet format with specific bit patterns in the header byte (I don't know why anyone still does this these days.)

As far as auto-tuning, yes, I've invested a great deal of thought into it. It will happen one day.

[woj]

So let me on this occasion also share some thoughts about ignition RT tuning. I was on steady state dyno and in fact the first (and so far the last) time in my life. What I just could not get around was watching the dyno screen, updating ignition cell (one!) back and forth, updating and checking the changes on the dyno screen again. On top of that I had to watch out for knock in the head phones and EGT (with EGT it was easy with an alarm telling me we are not there). Because of EGT and knock issues everything had to be done quite quick not to hold the engine in an unsafe zone. But, every change required entering the offset amount, pressing Execute, and the pressing Update. With no mouse connected and I am a lousy touchpad user and don't trust myself with quick usage of keyboard shortcuts. Luckily I had the dyno operator help me out with all this, because my confusion was rendering me totally helpless at some moments

So, long after that event I kept thinking on how this could be done optimally. So something along these lines came to my head:

Tuner keeps changing one ignition cell back and forth (either automatically at a certain speed or after a "Try next value" button). After every change and auto-update it announces this somehow (sound) and waits of user reaction through some buttons:

- There is more power
- There is less power
- Power stays practically the same
- There is knock
- EGT is out of assumed limit.

After few steps Tuner tells you "I found the optimal ignition window", then it is up to the user to choose the final value. Or it says "You pushed something too far and no safe ignition can be found for this cell".

Just an idea...