jayscoobs

iTrader: (8)

The only thing that would steer me away from a Adaptronic is the no commander for monitoring. Although they do have a android app but unfortunately I don't have a android. Can also do a dash2 but a little much for a street car in my eyes. I just like to reduce clutter.

James Paventi

iTrader: (34)

Check the thread that I linked to in post 10, above. A lot of this has been answered there.

AdaptronicAus

Hello, thank you for the questions.

1) On the Select ECUs, it's automated; the ECU calculates the fuel requirement. The ECU then calculates the time between injection strokes based on the RPM and whether it's a 4 stroke or a 2 stroke. The ECU then works out the maximum injector duration based on this, and a minimum off time which is hard coded in the firmware at 0.5ms.

If the ECU can deliver all the fuel with the primary injectors, then it can, otherwise it delivers the maximum pulse on the primary injectors and then the rest on the secondary injectors. So the primary and secondary injectors have different on-times, and you don't notice the transition. For example on my FD engine I have factory primary injectors and 2000cc secondaries and looking at a power run you can't even see where the secondaries come on, and you only have one map to tune. It makes it really easy and effective. Previously we had different conditions to make the secondaries come on, like exceeding a certain millisecond value on the primary injectors and so on, and I found that it was too complex to explain to most people, so I had to find a way to automate it in a way that works really well. I'm very glad we did that because this is the only question I have to answer (I don't get people telling me they're running out of fuel because the staging isn't set up correctly, for example).

On the 1280 you can program it to do anything you want to.

2) On the Select, it's start of injection, and it's fixed to time with the induction cycle. On the 1280 you can program it. Being able to change this is on my list of things to put into the Select ECUs.

3) Only the 1280 supports DBW, and again the 1280 can be programmed to do anything. By default it's only used for throttle and idle control but you could configure it to do antilag, cruise control, traction control etc, you just need to set up the logic to do it.

4) I didn't know that factory ECUs were doing that; what I found was that if you do that and you're at the torque peak then your NOx emissions get really high, so I'm surprised that factory ECUs can do it and still be emissions compliant... but there you go. I wouldn't recommend this on a rotary because in my experience they don't seem to be very timing sensitive (ie, the torque curve vs ignition timing is pretty flat once you've got it right) and also in practice I found that it was really only when the engine was pretty much at constant speed that the signal was clean enough to be usable; you can't do that at full throttle on the street on a car with a decent power to weight ratio for obvious reasons!

5) Again, we're not designing a factory ECU, and there are lots of things that we could add in, but we need to make a judgement call and say that we're not going to put that in, because only 0.1% of people are going to use it, and it has the potential to stuff up for people if they don't set it up correctly. Every engine is different and even background noise levels are quite different from one engine to another - as an example a stock SR20 vs a built SR20 with a strong bottom end "sounds" quite different and has different background knock levels. So no, we don't have plans to do that, but again you could implement that in the 1280 if you wanted to. The 1280 has better knock sensing than the Select because it's engine angle sensitive.

6) So you run less boost on lower ethanol content? Eg pump gas 10 psi, E85 20 psi? Yes, that's on The List already

7) So, basically like the adaptive fuel tuning except with a coarser map for corrections rather than the fine detail of the fuel map? Yeah that's a good idea... I like that one... I'll put that on The List but it will be after the things I mentioned above.


No!!!! I'm not saying that! In theory that might work, but in practice there are several limitations that prevent you from doing this:

1) The ECU's ability to learn and correct is based on experience. This means that cells around the cruise conditions get a lot of data, but the high load points don't get much correction because, quite simply, on a fast car, you can't spend too long at those conditions on the street.

2) You can't measure the effects on power/torque on the street.

I haven't found that myself on an FD. The ignition map in the ECU is the ignition map I run in my FD, which was one based on Ric Shaw's timing map he runs in his enduro car with the 1280 with pump gas. My car runs E85, and I tried putting in more timing to see if the engine wanted it, and it didn't knock, and it didn't make any more power, it just made the same power - at least in the range of about 15 psi. Maybe at very high boost levels you get an improvement due to ignition timing that you can crank in on E85, but again, you can't measure it on the street, you need a dyno to get an objective measure.

It's not a replacement for tuning, it's a tuning aid.


Oh, and with the logging and software, TOTALLY. People often ask me why I don't just make a datalogger with a couple of G sensors and a GPS antenna; it wouldn't be that hard. That's completely true and a datalogger is a much simpler device than an ECU. However almost all the R+D goes into the analysis software. i2 (the Motec one for the uninitiated) has 100 man-years of R+D in it so far. Mr Motec told me that figure once and I thought "wow" and then I thought "Hmmm, team of 10 software engineers, 10 years... yeah that sounds about right". The Race Technology stuff isn't as clean as the Motec software, and that's one reason it's cheaper than the Motec solutions.

arghx

iTrader: (3)

Maybe we're not talking about the exact same thing... your timing adapting logic has a lot of similarities to misfire diagnostic monitors used in OBD logic. But that's a real side issue, not something we can get into. I've got some block diagrams that are more along the lines of what I was talking about. We could take that discussion to PM if you want to, but it's not relevant to the performance tuning market needs.

Totally agree about them being more ignition timing insensitive than piston engines.

Understandable. Pretty much only Subaru tuners would be used to something like that.
I can see some demand for that feature

Yeah that's sort of it. If you look at how a lot of fuel trims are operating now, you've got one stored adaptive fuel trim for up to a certain load point, then another trim for higher loads, etc. Each zone starts at 0% correction and learns independently, then is stored independently, so learning from high load doesn't affect learning from low load.

Anyway, I'm just kind of making conversation at this point. The ethanol-based boost is probably the only feature that a large number of users might take advantage of. Having a gazillion features and sophisticated calculations is pointless if people set them wrong or never use them.

I appreciate you answering my questions in a direct manner. Thank you for your time.

Monkman33

iTrader: (28)

I sold my pro efi 128 and it had the ability to change the maximum boost threshold based on ethanol content. That was a feature I really liked.

From what I can tell, the 1280s already has the capability to do it with some creative usage of the Elements.

moehler

iTrader: (12)

AdaptronicAus, thanks for clearing up my confusion. This line from the OP might lead many to think that the ECU does the tuning for you. Either way, it looks like a nice product, and it's good to have another plug and play option out there.

AdaptronicAus

No worries - I have done tuning that way before but it is subject to the limitations I mentioned above. The last thing I want to do is oversell a product.