Ford Cortina / Rover V8 3.9 / bank fire / wasted spark

[jsmcortina]

Details of my install.
Vehicle. 1969 Ford Cortina II estate
Engine. Rover V8 3.9
Intake converted to EFI with custom throttle body.
Bank fire injectors
36-1 crank trigger
Wasted spark from 2x EDIS coil packs.

I have been running wasted spark on MS1/Extra since August 05, having started on fuel only in April 05.

A year or so back I'd made an adapter loom to allow me to run an MS2/Extra setup with the wasted spark.
Yesterday I installed my MS3 card into that board with the loom.
Initially I loaded my old MS1/Extra MSQ over the top of the MS3 defaults, but this was a bad idea. Practically none of the settings carry over.
A better approach is to export/import your spark and VE tables and re-key the rest - going through each menu and confirming.

To start with I'd made a few mistakes in the settings which kept it from running well and I found and fixed a code bug to do with priming. Now using 20090622 code.

Today the engine fired up and runs ok. I found I needed to reduce my dwell to around 2.0ms or I was getting jumpy and advancing spark on the strobe. This likely needs more investigation. With 3.5ms dwell I was getting 10-20 deg spurious advance with my Fixed timing set to 20. With 2.0ms dwell the timing seems ok. EDIT: On the bench I couldn't see any problems and at both 800rpm and 2600rpm the advance was locked at 20deg.

With the spark advance issue solved or at least better I was ready for a test drive. Naturally I wanted to take a log with the new SD card feature. There may be a bug with 4G cards at the moment as that one didn't reliably initialise in the car - will have to figure out why. So, I stuck my 1G card in instead and it worked ok.

So, then I went for my maiden voyage on MS3. In a way it was rather a non-event actually. It just worked. I drove to the shops and back with no problems. This was still with the VE and spark tables imported from MS1/Extra. It run much the same as MS1 although it will need some retuning to get the most out of the MS3.

I'm now looking at the SD card logs I recorded at a 5ms interval - I think MegaLogViewer is going to need a zoom OUT option...

James

[dontz125]

We ran into this thing with the SD cards a while back, trying to get Grandma's digital picture frame christmas present sorted out. It seems that 4G+ SD-HC cards are somehow different from the 2G and down standard SD cards; if your reader isn't configured for them, you can't use it. I think it has to do with FAT16 vs FAT32, or FAT32 vs FAT64 - not sure (my level of computer competence is still back with my Commodore 64...).

[jsmcortina]

I've had the 4G SDHC cards working ok on the bench, but seemingly it had some problems on the car ?! I haven't investigated why just yet.

James

[muythaibxr]

Yeah, in other words we know they're different, and we support both SD and SDHC, but occasionally when you plug in an SDHC card, it doesn't init properly.

In other words there is a bug in the code that is keeping it from working on occasion. We'll likely have it sorted soon.

Ken

[jsmcortina]

Put some more miles on the Cortina this weekend and found a few issues I need to work out too.

Here's a weird one - on Saturday I found that with the SDcard plugged in I can't start the engine!? Pop it out and the engine fired up. Then drove about 30 miles of mixed motorway and A-road, car ran fine. Got the tacho output on FIDLE working too.

On Sunday I came to fire the car up and even without the SDcard, it wasn't wanting to get sync. Seeing as I was 30 miles away from home in the middle of a field I thought it best to reconnect the MS1 and drive home.

I have some datalogs which I'll be analysing. The sync loss is likely an install problem as it works great on the bench. I need to take some cranking composite logs and understand what is happening. The correlation with the SDcard seemed real, but I'll find out over the coming days testing.

I intend to use the car for my daily use where possible to get the most test data.

James

[jsmcortina]

I extended the SD logging software to record a sample per tooth (only possible at very low rpms) to collect more data.

I only managed a short test session today and also grabbed some composite logs.

The SD card actually has no effect on startup, so my thoughts above are proved to be incorrect.

The composite logs (assessed in a spreadsheet) were most useful though, I had the input capture set wrong. I swapped the setting (from falling to rising as it happens) and took another composite log. Now the missing tooth shows as a single long tooth, previously it was showing as one long tooth, followed by a medium length tooth. So sometimes the code was getting sync and sometimes it wasn't.

I hope to do more testing tomorrow, such as ten consecutive start attempts.

James

[Quan-Time]

just quickly about the SD card, if its formatted to FAT16, it will only write to the 1st 2gb of the partition, ignoring th rest. If its formatted to fat32 (as many 4+gb cards are) many devices WONT read the card. As it needs to convert the FAT system, which they cant do on the fly.

Id personally try getting a 4+gb card that "doesnt" work, format a 2gb partition in fat16, leave the rest unformatted. See how things go from there. Thats a very common hack which works well.
If you cant leave it unformatted, make several partitions, all 2gb max in fat16. But try a single with dud space first. Should help with compat / read and write issues.

Grats about your success too

[jsmcortina]

How do you format or partition these cards? I can do it in Linux, but what about Windows users. XP won't allow me to partition the card, the menu options are missing.

James

[jsmcortina]

Took the Cortina for another reasonable drive this evening about 30 miles to the cruise via motorways and then about 25 miles back across the city.

Since my last drive I have enabled "Include AFR" and recalculated my VE table to take account of that. (It sure would be nice if the tuning software could do that as it is a PITA to do by hand.) I have also enabled EAE and done minimal tuning of it.

Generally the car perform ok under cruise conditions, but my tune is quite a long way out in places. I think I'm getting a rich misfire at times when pulling away from lights. This leads to a sync loss or reset and a very jerky unpleasant experience.... I remember having this a very long while back on my MS1 install and was mainly due to accel tuning, so after I've sorted out my VE table I can start work on EAE.

I have logs on my laptop until it crashed somewhere on the way home and numerous logs on the SDcard too.

James

[Quan-Time]

heh, yes i prefer linux too for formatting. Mainly coz it "works"

A good win32 based solution is Partition Magic 8. Ive used that many times to great success.. BUT that is not free.

Windows based systems see removable cards as just that, removable, NOT fixed. You can screw around with fdisk / format / diskpart in a cmd prompt.. or you can do some reg hackin.. not TOO hard.. Ive personally never tried it, BUT it seems reasonable enough.. (i dual boot arch / winxp)

http://www.1src.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133718

From my quick searching around, there is no available (free) software for doing this task. I know from experience that part magic8 reboots at some point to "finish the task". I suspect this is because windows wont see th disk properly.

And just spoke to a mate, he will start workin on a solution now.. he is a fairly hardcore programmer, ill post some results about it later. Will be a win32 based prog, fairly "simple".

[jsmcortina]

Having a few VR conditioner issues.. and getting way too many sync-losses.
I confirmed that this is not an MS3 code issue though (phew) as MS2/Extra does the same.

The composite logger shows the VR circuit is somehow missing numerous teeth. Will diagnose more with the scope when I get chance.

James

[jsmcortina]

I found one of my plugs was fouled (this happens with cold plugs) so I swapped it out. That improved things a lot, instead of 89 sync losses in 7 minutes, it was down to just a handful.

Then time yesterday I analysed the V3 VR conditioner. It was behaving perfectly - doing exactly what it should be doing and responding to fairly low input levels.

However, the signal coming IN to the Megasquirt was a different matter - there were gaps in the signal! So today I fitted a different VR sensor and...

BINGO! The car runs sweetly again.

So now I can restart my tuning again. I did about 60 miles this evening and all seemed well. I have a 30 minute log running through the VE analyser now.

James

[UnaClocker]

VR sensors seem to really suck, for lack of a better word. The crank sensors on most modern Dodges would be an alternative. It'll read the same teeth that the VR sensor does, looks a lot like a VR sensor too. Except that it's got three wires: Ground, 5v, and a nice square wave signal output. No VR input conditioning circuit needed.
Granted, I do understand you want to fully test the code, and bad sensors might be a good way of doing that, but in the end, if you want a more reliable solution..

[muythaibxr]

I've actually not had too much problem with VR once it's properly conditioned. I run it on both of my megasquirted vehicles with no issues whatsoever.

I don't think VR is the issue, I think the issue is how to condition it.

I've also seen noise issues with hall sensors.

Ken

[jsmcortina]

To reconfirm - the VR conditioning circuit (standard V3 type) was behaving perfectly, not conditioning problems at all. However the input signal from the VR varied from textbook perfect to... absent...

Top trace. Input to CPU.
Bottom trace input to Megasquirt board.
Note1. For some reason my software is showing the signals upside down.
Note2 - the inputs I was using here are capacitively coupled, so at low revs the digital top trace gets a bit messy. At higher rpms it is nice and square.

What you can see is that even with low input amplitude the V3 VR circuit is working fine. However, then my VR sensor or wiring decides not to input any signal at all.

bad vr signal2.JPG

There seems to be some myth about hall sensors being immune to noise. The noise isn't usually the sensor itself, but in the cables from the sensor to the ECU. The noise energy doesn't care what sensor is attached to the other end. Say if your sensor cables run parallel to the high tension spark plug wires you'll almost certainly get a problem.

James

[racingmini_mtl]

Have you checked if the sensor bracket and/or the sensor itself is not moving? Did you check with the previous sensor? This would seem to be related to how the sensor is being held and/or the connector/wiring since you said it work perfectly once you changed sensor and changing the sensor would affect those, at least momentarily.

Jean

[jsmcortina]

I drove about 180 miles on MS3 over the weekend, no issue to report.

The only problem I had was forgetting that I don't have flat shift set up and trying to use it. Oops - straight to my hard rev limit.

James

[jsmcortina]

Did another couple of 2 hr drives on MS3 (driving to and from dragstrip.)

After two days doing clutch and gearbox work on the car I was out of time to use the latest code, so this was still on 2009/08/20

On the way there I had a few problems getting TunerStudio to work right on my 300MHz laptop as I was trying to use it while driving, so I pretty much gave up on that. It was very late at night, so my patience was low. I also found that connecting to the running MS3 @ circa 3000rpm, TS did something to cause two sync losses each time it connects.
I did find that "simple" closed loop EGO with the default settings didn't work as well as open-loop. I had more stable and leaner AFRs with EGO off.

For the return journey I got TS to work fine, being able to see the keyboard likely helped. I spent most of the journey tuning in realtime and make some good improvements to the VE table. Most of the time I was cruising lean of stoich.

Soon I'll be wiring in the inputs and outputs so I can race on MS3.

James

[jsmcortina]

Connected up my clutch switch and I can confirm that launch and flat shift work much the same as MS1.

James

[jsmcortina]

Put another 200 miles on MS3 this weekend.
Seems my crank sensor or wiring is still not fixed as I got some sync-loss on the way home. Now that TunerStudio allows access to the "sync error" logger, I was able to let it automatically capture the dodgy tooth pattern that caused a sync loss. Waggling the crank sensor cable when I got home caused an engine stumble, so I'm sure that's is the problem.

SD logging appeared to work ok. I wasn't seeing an errors and have many files to examine.

Other than that, nothing to report.

James