Project Lex (92 Royal Jade SC300)
03-10-11, 05:28 PM
#106
OK did a little bit of playing today per the advice of some gurus. I played with the Zero Crossing pot, and with the different edge triggering options. See pics below.
BEFORE Adjusting Zero Crossing pot log.
AFTER Adjusting Zero Crossing pot log.
- Zoom to see where the cam trigger falls in comparison to the crank triggers. Ideally it should fall exactly between two of the crank pulses. I played with the different edge options. This pic shows the best combination I could get which is Falling Falling.
So the cam signal is much better now. But I'm still having the same problem. The cam pulse appears to be as steady as can be, so the crank signal has to be the cause of all this. Will continue this battle this weekend and hopefully get this thing working!!
BEFORE Adjusting Zero Crossing pot log.
AFTER Adjusting Zero Crossing pot log.
- Zoom to see where the cam trigger falls in comparison to the crank triggers. Ideally it should fall exactly between two of the crank pulses. I played with the different edge options. This pic shows the best combination I could get which is Falling Falling.
So the cam signal is much better now. But I'm still having the same problem. The cam pulse appears to be as steady as can be, so the crank signal has to be the cause of all this. Will continue this battle this weekend and hopefully get this thing working!!
03-16-11, 10:55 AM
#107
Had a couple minutes to look at some more stuff. In this video I'm reading the raw cam signal (G2) coming in, and am reading the processed cam signal on JP2 pin 18 on the silver MS3 board. In a nutshell MS just takes the sine wave signal, and creates a square wave based on where the raw signal crosses the 0V line. Thanks again Shane for the scope, I wouldn't be able to do any of this if I didn't have it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3eBiVhBgWo
All this signal checking crap has finally convinced me to buy my own scope. Big thanks again to Shane for lending me his as it's proving to be a huge help, and helping me learn a ton about how MS works. I'm hoping he'll let me hang onto it for a little bit longer yet until I get the hang of my new scope.
http://www.hobbylab.us/default.aspx
That's what I got. $129 It's a USB based device that you use with your computer (I'll just use it with my little netbook). It's been used by a few of the MS guys and they've all said it works quite well. It's a 2ch Oscope, and a 16ch Logic Analyzer. The software is apparently pretty easy to navigate as well. I heard the probes that come with it leave a little to be desired, so I picked up some better ones off Ebay for $12 shipped.
Someday eventually I'd like to get a true standalone scope w/ 4 channels, but for now this seemed like a great starter unit for a decent price. But in the future, if I could find some old analog Tektronix 4ch sucker for cheap on Craigslist, that'd be cool
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3eBiVhBgWo
All this signal checking crap has finally convinced me to buy my own scope. Big thanks again to Shane for lending me his as it's proving to be a huge help, and helping me learn a ton about how MS works. I'm hoping he'll let me hang onto it for a little bit longer yet until I get the hang of my new scope.
http://www.hobbylab.us/default.aspx
That's what I got. $129 It's a USB based device that you use with your computer (I'll just use it with my little netbook). It's been used by a few of the MS guys and they've all said it works quite well. It's a 2ch Oscope, and a 16ch Logic Analyzer. The software is apparently pretty easy to navigate as well. I heard the probes that come with it leave a little to be desired, so I picked up some better ones off Ebay for $12 shipped.
Someday eventually I'd like to get a true standalone scope w/ 4 channels, but for now this seemed like a great starter unit for a decent price. But in the future, if I could find some old analog Tektronix 4ch sucker for cheap on Craigslist, that'd be cool
03-16-11, 03:22 PM
#108
Checked signal at J1 which is the crank square wave. Here's a vid of the crank signal. Was hoping I'd find a smoking gun on this today and be able to work it out with the filtering function in TS, but nothing really caught my eye.
[youtube]SD4od1097tA[/youtube]
After looking at the square waves of both the Crank and Cam, it seems like the correct settings for this in TS would be Rising & Rising.
Starting to run out of ideas here as so far nothing has stood out to me as being an issue thus far. I'm going to take another video comparing the square cam & crank to show how they match up. After that, I really am starting to run out of ideas. I just ordered up a HobbyLab USB scope so I should be able to take some logs with it with the Logic Analyzer function that might be able to tell us more than this old scope meter.
[youtube]SD4od1097tA[/youtube]
After looking at the square waves of both the Crank and Cam, it seems like the correct settings for this in TS would be Rising & Rising.
Starting to run out of ideas here as so far nothing has stood out to me as being an issue thus far. I'm going to take another video comparing the square cam & crank to show how they match up. After that, I really am starting to run out of ideas. I just ordered up a HobbyLab USB scope so I should be able to take some logs with it with the Logic Analyzer function that might be able to tell us more than this old scope meter.
03-16-11, 08:20 PM
#109
OK well just took a wild stab and it seems to be 100 times better, although not completely taken care of. Since earlier some signs were telling me that the crank trigger was the likely cause of this, I decided to enable crank only filtering. I used the Tach Rejection feature, and set it to 30% as that was a value I had seen thrown around in the filtering documentation on here. And what do ya know, the issue seems to have 99% gone away. You'll see in this video that it still lost sync a couple times under WOT, but way better than before. I will play with filtering a little bit more and hopefully be done with this issue.
One thing I did notice was that in the composite log, the crank now shows up as a square wave instead of just a single edge as it did before. No idea what that means however.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZPwl3fj34I
One thing I did notice was that in the composite log, the crank now shows up as a square wave instead of just a single edge as it did before. No idea what that means however.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZPwl3fj34I
03-17-11, 12:20 PM
#112
Lexus Test Driver
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expalin me very quickly what does all this do, i know ms is engine management cr@p, but why u need all this on na motor???
also so far i only heard bad rep about megasquirterrr
also so far i only heard bad rep about megasquirterrr
03-17-11, 12:46 PM
#113
I think you're looking at it wrong. This car will be turboed. I'm doing to front end work to get it ready to be turboed.
In my opinion, something like this is much easier to get setup and all bugs worked out if you start with a good working car, espeically considering MS is the road less traveled, so bugs are to be expected, and w/ less support than say, AEM. So I chose to do this on the car while it's still pretty much stock, running perfectly normal, to make troubleshooting simpler. Can you imagine if I already tore everything apart, added the turbo, injectors, plugs, wires, FFIM and TB, etc... and had these issues? I'd have no idea if I'm missfiring because of Megasquirt, or bad injectors, or plugs, or boost leak, etc... You'll end up chasing your tail. Much easier to start with a known good condition when doing something like this, in my opinion of course. Once I get MS running correctly, the turboing will ensue.
As for the bad rep MS has, I contribute that to the DIY nature of it. It's not that it's incapable, but it is very DIY in nature, which accounts for the lower cost, and will also result in a lot of hack jobs, which can give it a bad reputation. Doesn't make it bad in reality. It just means it can do great things for fairly cheap when in the right hands, and it can be a nightmare in the wrong hands. I fall somewhere in the middle I think. I'm making progress, but there is definately a learning curve that comes with it if you are new to standalones. And I'm definately learning, but still so much to learn, and I'm not there quite yet. But I'm starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel I think
In my opinion, something like this is much easier to get setup and all bugs worked out if you start with a good working car, espeically considering MS is the road less traveled, so bugs are to be expected, and w/ less support than say, AEM. So I chose to do this on the car while it's still pretty much stock, running perfectly normal, to make troubleshooting simpler. Can you imagine if I already tore everything apart, added the turbo, injectors, plugs, wires, FFIM and TB, etc... and had these issues? I'd have no idea if I'm missfiring because of Megasquirt, or bad injectors, or plugs, or boost leak, etc... You'll end up chasing your tail. Much easier to start with a known good condition when doing something like this, in my opinion of course. Once I get MS running correctly, the turboing will ensue.
As for the bad rep MS has, I contribute that to the DIY nature of it. It's not that it's incapable, but it is very DIY in nature, which accounts for the lower cost, and will also result in a lot of hack jobs, which can give it a bad reputation. Doesn't make it bad in reality. It just means it can do great things for fairly cheap when in the right hands, and it can be a nightmare in the wrong hands. I fall somewhere in the middle I think. I'm making progress, but there is definately a learning curve that comes with it if you are new to standalones. And I'm definately learning, but still so much to learn, and I'm not there quite yet. But I'm starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel I think
Last edited by Halon; 03-17-11 at 12:59 PM.
03-17-11, 05:11 PM
#114
Played with the filtering a bit. I have the global filter time now set to 5uS. That basically means, any pulse that is less than 5uS in length gets filtered out. Anything longer than that is considered good and is used. So basically goes off the assumption that good signals are long, and noise is short.
I then set the rejection percentage to 70%. That means that it predicts when it should see the next pulse. So anything that happens within the first 70% of that time gets ignored. For example say it predicts it'll see the next pulse in 100ms, it'll wait for 70ms until it even starts looking for it again. So any noise that is occurring in the first 70ms is completely ignored.
Car is running like a champ!!! Goint to hookup the ignition again and make sure she's running good still. If so, I may start talking to Shane about getting a quick base tune before the turboing begins!!
I then set the rejection percentage to 70%. That means that it predicts when it should see the next pulse. So anything that happens within the first 70% of that time gets ignored. For example say it predicts it'll see the next pulse in 100ms, it'll wait for 70ms until it even starts looking for it again. So any noise that is occurring in the first 70ms is completely ignored.
Car is running like a champ!!! Goint to hookup the ignition again and make sure she's running good still. If so, I may start talking to Shane about getting a quick base tune before the turboing begins!!
03-21-11, 06:05 PM
#116
Well went out to try and troubleshoot the revving issue I mentioned earlier. I fixed it pretty quickly suprisingly (lucky guess). It was obviously something with the ignition so I just started there. I first changed the Ignition setting from Speed Density to Percent Baro per a comment over on the MS boards. Didn't fix it but I think it's setting I should have been set to so I'm going to leave it at Percent Baro. I then, just for fun, changed the ignition max dwell setting from 3.0ms to the max value of 25.0ms. Car idled like total crap. I then changed it to the extreme the other way to the lowest value of 1.0ms. Bam, car revs like a dream. So there it remains. I have no clue how to know what the right setting is for this car, but 3.0ms cause issues, 1.0ms runs like a dream, so 1.0 it will remain until I'm told otherwise.
Woohoo!! Going to drive it around for a week to see if I notice any issues. If not, I will button up the MS box and mount it in the footwell a little nicer with some velcrow strapping or something. Then I'll probably be talking to Shane @ DBPerformance soon there after for a quick tune prior to turboz.
Video for your viewing pleasure:
[youtube]t2ki52efsZE[/youtube]
Woohoo!! Going to drive it around for a week to see if I notice any issues. If not, I will button up the MS box and mount it in the footwell a little nicer with some velcrow strapping or something. Then I'll probably be talking to Shane @ DBPerformance soon there after for a quick tune prior to turboz.
Video for your viewing pleasure:
[youtube]t2ki52efsZE[/youtube]
03-30-11, 04:19 PM
#117
Well one last glitch I've been trying to work out is cranking. Sometimes it starts a little rough. While troubleshooting last night, the car just shut off and wouldn't restart. Narrowed it down to loss of spark.
Shane was nice enough to lend me the coil and ignitor off his SC300. Turns out my ignitor died. New one from a parts store is 300-400 bucks
So looks like I'll be checking the local junk yards 
Big thanks to Shane for lending me the stuff!
Also, it looks like DB's dyno schedule is a bit busy, so I may opt to not get it tuned before doing the turbo, since it does seem to be running fairly well overall as-is. Bolted the turbo up to the mani today just to see if there is any clearance issues with the compressor housing hitting the manifold. It clears like this, so this is prolly how it will end up being aimed. I also put one picture showing it clocked to the point that it hits the #1 runner.
Shane was nice enough to lend me the coil and ignitor off his SC300. Turns out my ignitor died. New one from a parts store is 300-400 bucks
So looks like I'll be checking the local junk yards Big thanks to Shane for lending me the stuff!
Also, it looks like DB's dyno schedule is a bit busy, so I may opt to not get it tuned before doing the turbo, since it does seem to be running fairly well overall as-is. Bolted the turbo up to the mani today just to see if there is any clearance issues with the compressor housing hitting the manifold. It clears like this, so this is prolly how it will end up being aimed. I also put one picture showing it clocked to the point that it hits the #1 runner.
04-02-11, 01:49 PM
#118
Well, the time has come... Turbo Time !!
I parked her in the driveway. Cleaned out the garage where she'll be parked for the next couple months. Jacked her up and gave her a good underbody cleaning/degreasing before starting work.
Parked and up on jack stands
The parts stash that I've been slowly accumulating over the past few months. Finally get to put them to use
I parked her in the driveway. Cleaned out the garage where she'll be parked for the next couple months. Jacked her up and gave her a good underbody cleaning/degreasing before starting work.
Parked and up on jack stands
The parts stash that I've been slowly accumulating over the past few months. Finally get to put them to use
