Known E11v2 Firmware problems/issues?
 

Hey guys, I've got a 20B FC I'm working on for a buddy of mine that is having some problems.. One minute, it seems to work well. The next, it's as if there's something jacked witth the ignition o something else. We were stranded with the car at a gas station for a good two hours or so late toninght. I've been pulling my hair outt ttrying to figure out why. I got what I thought was a decentt map loaded earlier this evening that I made and got the car to fire up, idle, throttle and run pretty consistently. Although it was still having some problems below 1500rpm, I felt confident that it could be driven around the neighbourhood. We stopped once to get gas and there was no problem. However, about 10-15 min later after some cruising, we stopped to get gas again and justt as we were pulling towards the station the car died and wouldn't restart. We tried everytthing -- original map, my map, leaning it out, richening it up, adding and removing primer, removing and deflooding the engine, etc. all to no avail. We had to tow the car home. We suspectt that the ECU/fuel pump may have some power & wiring issues as its wired into the stock ECU but my gut ttells me it's something else such as a possible firmware bug. Does anybody have any other info? I am a bit apprehensive now to drive the vehicle tomorrow due to this even if I do manage to get it started. It is currently running Build 28 with Halwin 1.59 but I do have earlier firmware builds (but not Build 29).

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

B

Brian.
I havn't had any problems with that version as of yet. But you never know. It might be harware related. Can you give some details on the setup ie. ignition, inj. etc.? Have you tried diagnosing the problem, check for spark, fuel etc.?

I have half a mind to re-wire both thte ECU power and fuel pump power to their own relays and fuse block off the battery terminal. Per the previous owner, the E11v2's wiring harness is wired into the stock wiring harness.

I know it has fuel and I can hear spark but I am wondering if it is intermittent or something. The problem with this seems to be outside of the scope of 'normal' problems where nothing seems tto make sense. That's why I am curious about the firmware or something else.

The ignition I was told are GM coils (6 of them resting in sequence bolted to the top of the engine on a mounting bracket) although they have 'Denso' written on them. The motor is street ported but otherwise stock. The injection setup is stock 550 pri and Bosche 1680 secondaries running a base pressure of 47psi with the stock FPR.

I just got Firmware build 29 and am going to give it a whirl. Thanks for the response Crispeed.

B

In my experience, if the setup is running just fine, more often than not, the problem lies outside the ECU, only in a handfull of times its been ECU related, but then again i dont know everything:D.

Anyway, if this is an FC, why would you even consider leaving the stock ECU in lieu of the E11? Seems rather pointless, unless of course, the harness you got with this kit is the Short one, no relays or fuses, and had to splice it into the original one.

To me, it sounds like it could be a fuel pump issue, have you checked fuel pressure? Also, using the 550/1600cc injector combo, with a stock fuel pressure regulator, also sounds a bit odd, i dont recommend it, specially with those hungry 1600 onboard.

Claudio,

When I got the wiring harness with the motor, it was already wired up. Basicly, the only parts of the stock harness that were retained are the plug that connects the windshield wipers which also is providing the switched and constant power for the E11. A number of stock sensor connectors were also used.

As a potential solution, B rewired the Haltech to a new fuse block/power supply, etc. So far no real luck even after swapping new plugs in. He's about to try a new map and a couple of different settings. We'll see....

Oh, fuel pressure is fine as well. I have a fuel pressure gauge in-car so I can keep an eye on that. Once I get it running properly I'll look into a new FPR. Thanks for the suggestion, Claudio!

Reese

Ok, cool. So, if fuel pump pressure is always dead on, then fuel pump power is not suffering. You said you "hear spark"? did you fisically check that all the coils are firing? what ignition modules/amplifiers are you using? bosch/haltech, msd, something else? are they all working fine?

Just for the heck of it, are you using the stock 20B CAS? is there an RPM signal? hey, you never know. :D

LS-1 coils. They are all firing. We pulled the wires off and visually verified spark.

I have an extra CAS but I've been running this one for the last year with no issues.

Brian just left me a message saying that the motor is simply pushing fuel through the motor (i.e. gas is puddling under the downpipe where it is being pushed straight through...)

I'm confused to say the least!

Reese

Check the data screen and make sure the trigger count is working or just make sure you're not losing the signal form the CAS.
I've seen where the ignition set up was not correct and it burned the ignition output channels. Most of the times the wrong ignition setup would burn the igniter but in a couple of instances I've seen a bad igniter fry the ignition output.
Brian can you state how the actual trigger and ignition setup is on the Haltech?
Also make sure and follow the instructions for the firmware upgrade. You got to follow the sequence of instructions properly for firmware build 29/1.62 software to be loaded.

mechanically the ignition is 6 gm ls1 coils, which have an internal ignitor so they are wired directly.

the wire harness is basically the stock mazda harness with the emissions removed and the e11 plugs spliced onto it. so it plugs into the car, and uses the stock mazda power circuits for fuel and well the emissions power (blk/white) for igntion.

Yep both the home and trigger couunts are ticking away wheere the home is about half the trigger. Here's the ignition setup:

Direct Fire, Ign/Trail spark edge Falling, Dwell modes Const Charge set to 8ms for these LS1 coils, Spark break time .6ms.

Trigger setup (stock CAS):

Multitooth Rotary in Reluctorr mode for both Home and Trigger, Trigger/Home Signal edges Falling, Pre-Gain filters both set to 2, and gain controls both set to 1.

Done the firmware updating several times forwards and backwards.

Just deflooded it and cleaned the plugs. I also unplugged the secondary injectors juust incase thee's a short causing one of them to peg 100%. I noticed during deeflooding that there was gobs morre gas in the center chamber over the other two so who knows...

B

what condition is the motor in? Hows the compression? if the motor is ok.
Then you need to look elsewhere because flooding is not good.

Check to make sure your injectors are working properly. Make sure none of them are stuck open. Maybe you got wire shorts that are causing two many injector pulses on an injector.
I know it suck's but you need to go thru all the basics to troubleshoot this.
A scope would be a very nice tool to have so you can check every inj, coil, etc.
Otherwise there's other ways to check.

Make sure every coil is working and check where they spark at. Mark the crank and check with a timing light. Simply checking to see if there's spark is not enough info. If you have a good timing light you can also do this with your injectors. Clamp the inductive probe over the pulsing inj wire and see where it fires as well. These tests will help you find where the problem is. Plugs are fouling correct? Which ones? is it a couple of them or all?

What dwell time do you have set for the LS1 coils? I usually use 5.5 ms for them.
They saturate at about 6 ms.

EDIT: I Just noticed your dwell setting of 8 ms. I believe this set too high!
Are the coils getting hot?

Do these tests and let me know what you find.

you might want to back off on the charge time. i fried a few ls1 coils with charge times at 5+ ms. i don't think they can handle that kind of duty since they're firing twice as many times as they were designed to anyway.

do you have one of those infrared temp sensors? y'know, the laser beam...
you might want to try revving the motor to 4-5kish, while checking the temp on the coils to see if they're overheating. maybe they have an auto-shutdown. there's like 4 or 5 variations of the "ls1" style coils. can you get a pic to show which kind you have on it?

Denso 280 is the most common one and i know they will saturate at anything over 6ms.

Brian has left the building (gone back to Texas) so unfortunately, I'm on my own now. I sure as hell hope I can figure this out as I'd hate for a brand new rebuild to go to waste... :)

I'm pretty sure they're Densos but I'll check when I get home tonight.

What really gets me is that not only does the map Brian wrote while he was here not work, neither does the map I ran for a full year! :sigh: It's going to be a beast when I get all this worked out...I just have to get to that point.

Reese

It's frustrating to have these issues and in the end it's always something very stupid that was causing all this drama.

Good Luck!

have you played with the filters and gains at all?

ok guys, I have good news and puzzling news...

The good news is that I got the car running 20 minutes after I started goofing with it after work. I reloaded one of my original maps that worked for a year. It's still a bit hard to start but I attibute that to the fact that it only has about 8 miles on it.

The puzzling part: It's pushing out massive amounts of fuel from the exhuast. I've got it idling at about 1000 once warmed up. While it's idling, bluish-whitish smoke is coming out fairly heavily and it will knock you on your ass if you stand around it too long. It's super rich smelling.

At idle it's right around 3.2ms and I'm only getting 1% or less fuel correction from any of the correction maps. (battery, etc).

Is there anything you can offer? I'm willing to send my map to whomever might want to look at it. I'll be honest... I don't have much clue as far as the ignition maps go so a little guidance there wouldn't hurt either! :)

Thanks!

Reese

90% of the time tuning is not done using a laptop.

Another words i feel your problem is something else.
There's either something wrong with your wiring, ign, or possibly an haltech problem.

Good point. I'm just wanting to take my map off the list of things that might be wrong. :)

Hmmm...I just can't figure out what it might be. I know the injectors aren't leaking or stuck. Brand new plugs in the engine. Timing is spot on.

I'll try to look at the injector wiring tomorrow to see if there is an issue there. Hopefully it'll be obvious.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Reese

Brian said the center plugs were badly fouled. That's a good place to start.
What you have to figure out now is why this is happening. Is it those injectors? Trying unplugging the secondary on the center and see what happens, unplug the primary see what happens, unplug the coil (l) see what happens, unplug the trailing see what happens.
You should get the idea by now.

Regarding the massive flooding issue, one thing I'd done before heading back home to TX was to unplug the secondary injectors. Not to imply fault on Reese, but all options have to be considered as I was troubleshooting this; point in fact being the change-over from the stock 550 secondaries to Bosche 1680's:

1) With Mike's original map being untouched, if it were to ever use the secondaries at any point (which I believe it did prior to reaching 0Kpa), then it would instantaneously flood the motor at those loads, all else remaining equal
2) The re-wiring of the three new secondary injector clips may've been shorted at some point unbeknownced to me or elsewhere downstream on the stock wiring to Haltech wiring splicing for all we know, implying a previously unknown problem

The history of the engine and Haltech setup since Reese has had it has been sketchy at best. It hasn't reliable to any degree where we could use it as a benchmark to point back to and say to ourselves, "these are the changes recently made since it's last worked well -- let's go back to those and troubleshoot those one at a time until we find the culprit." That doesn't mean that the previous owner (Mike) did a bad job at all; it just means that it hasn't been up to the point of where it could be since Reese has owned it. In any event, that makes it difficult to work with as Reese could've very well inhereited unknown problems with either the wiring harness, the ECU itself, or who knows. The problem is mysteriously strange as it seems to fall outside the pale of "normal troubleshooting" where changes made by the tuner/builder would otherwise, normally yield positive results. For much of the time since it was installed, we've been banging our heads at the wall trying to figure out what's wrong. My gut has said "ECU-related" possibly being Firmware, hence the reasoning behind this thread's first post.

When I tuned my buddy Lino Martinez' FC back in September time (using an E11v2 as well), we had spent several hours doing street and dyno stuff, basically getting it all sorted and doing well power-wise, but then I decided to update the firmware from Build 19 to Build 28 I believe it was. All the sudden, the car wouldn't start, was backfiring and popping, either running drastically richer or possibly not firing spark correctly. In any event, reverting back to Build 19 fixed the problem. The symptoms on Reese's car in alot of ways mimic Lino's symptoms so I've been scratching my head wondering whether or not something firmware related may be causing this.

Other than some ignition changes per the GM LS-1 coils Reese is using, honestly the fuel and spark maps shouldn't be that much different from that of a street-ported 13B using the same 550/1680 combination. I've created several maps by hand throughout this past week either by using my older E6K maps as a template, using Lino's dyno and w/b tuned fuel and ignition map, or by using one of HITman's old E6S 20B maps. I've even gone back to him for help and tried one of his maps he'd custom-made for me a couple nights back. With the exception of the one night where we did manage to get about 10 miles on it as Reese mentioned, where we were promptly stranded for 2 hrs at a BP gas station in the freezing cold with both customers and the station clerk watching us, nothing has really worked. ATF has generally helped get it started, and on a rare occasion, it has seemed to run, throttle, idle, and even drive decently well. It's strange because the one map I custom made a few days ago seemed to start and run REALLY well, then all the sudden left us stranded and wouldn't re-start at all.

B

its the MAP!!! its ether bad or hooked up to a bad VAC source. same thing happened to me

I suppose that's possible but wouldn't the Haltech show it in its display? Right now while it's idling, the active bar is exactly where it should be. I even tried recalibrating the Haltech to the sensor with no luck...

I hooked mine up to the oil-injection line off of the TB, but the line has no vacuum at all, but that line blows air. So the haltech thought it was in load and was dumping fuel. It was really bad, so bad you could see after 3-5 min's of running at idle

After rereading your post it’s not the MAP, is the haltech set-up for the right injectors?

I know the primaries are. I'll have to adjust for the 1600s in the secondaries.