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Finished installation about 3 weeks ago. Installation and startup have been a smooth process with the help from Taranabes. Car is an 87TII with an S5 stock ports. 550cc x 1680's, hybrid turbo, FMIC.
With the exception of a couple of minor issues, engine performs well. It's early in the tuning game, so fully expect (hopefully!!) things should get ironed out as time goes on. Fingers crossed not to be regretting not having gone sequential.
Idle range is pretty well dialed and the performance through 100 kpa. Response when stabbing the throttle is very good.
Issues:
1) Engine stalls while driving. Happens intermittently. Engine fires right up afterwards. I may go through several stop and go's before it happens again. It's a mystery why this is happening. If I just park the car and let it idle, it will idle perfectly forever with no synch loss. Engine pulling 17 inHg while idling.
2) Drive the car for a while, turn the engine off, then restart 1/2 hour or so later and the idle pretty crappy. Have to keep stabbing the throttle while trying to hold 1500 RPMs or so. AFRs show bouncing around quite lean for a minute or so until the engine settles down and AFRs come down to "normal". My engine seem to like ~12.5
Last edited by Clubuser; Feb 17, 2023 at 08:02 AM.
mine does that too. in my normal drive, to get coffee, the air temp will get to 15c or whatever. i park it for 45 minutes and come back and the air temp is 45c... so it runs really lean until the sensor cools off.
if you had a table for sensor heat soak it would work really well. i just have to tune the air temp table (PFC), and i can leave the idle a little rich.
with the faster sensor, and moving it to the elbow its like ~30 seconds it runs bad, vs a minute
I don't believe MS has a heat soak table, but you can raise the after-start enrichment to compensate. I'm using an MS3X but I think Microsquirt would have the same feature. It's under Startup/Idle, and you're looking for ASE Percent Adder and ASE Taper:
On the left side is ASE percent adder. This is the percent added fuel above the amount in the current VE table bin. You can increase this to run a richer mixture directly after startup at the given temp.
On the right side is the ASE taper, which is the amount of time (in engine cycles, so 400 cycles at 900rpm idle works out to a little under 30 seconds) that the percent adder is applied, again relative to temp.
In your situation (and mine since my car does the same thing) I would add more fuel into the 180 bin, and then if it works tune the taper time when I next park the car and give it time to heat soak.
However, this is related to coolant temperature, not MAT. So don't go overboard, otherwise when the MAT sensor isn't heat soaked the ASE is still being applied and the car will run quite rich. No harm in it, just smells bad and might pop a lot.
Aaron's guide is excellent, and his 'Basic Tuning' page in that guide was a massive help. There are a bunch of different settings inside TunerStudio though, and he doesn't go through all of them. My latest obsession has been trying to make the tune as "seamless" as I can, not in the VE / ignition table sense (as that requires a dyno) but by trying to tune all the little things no one talks about. Priming pulse, cranking enrichment, ASE, etc.
If you have time you should read the MS Hardware manual and the TunerStudio manual. The amount of different things going on inside the ECU at any given point is kind of crazy when you think about it.
It seems like these little things don't make much of a difference, but it lets you eliminate all those little annoyances and makes the car more pleasant to drive. Once you add them all up you end up with a much smoother experience
the factory ECU had an overly elaborate (yet easily escapable) hot start strategy.
obviously the MS doesn't use the FPR solenoid, but you could mimic the factory strategy in the software
the factory ECU had an overly elaborate (yet easily escapable) hot start strategy.
obviously the MS doesn't use the FPR solenoid, but you could mimic the factory strategy in the software
It's weird, I never noticed any difference with / without the orange solenoid on the stock ECU. Without the stock ECU, I now see what it was for.
I don't know how much spare I/O the Microsquirt has, but OP could even reinstall the solenoid and power it with the on/off output. I'm not sure if TunerStudio has a timer function for that though.
If you relocate the air temperature sensor, you may find yourself having to go back to square 1 with your VE tuning and air temp compensation. It's a big change, because the conditions you tuned the VE table in before are no longer there. How are you controlling idle?
Actually, to my surprise from initial start thru getting a good idle was a painless process. Once warm, I adjusted the idle range's VE values while observing the AFR's and engine vacuum. Idle never hunted. Once I was content with the VE #s, I enabled the idle control (BAC) and closed loop. Works great.
Aaron's guide is excellent, and his 'Basic Tuning' page in that guide was a massive help. There are a bunch of different settings inside TunerStudio though, and he doesn't go through all of them. My latest obsession has been trying to make the tune as "seamless" as I can, not in the VE / ignition table sense (as that requires a dyno) but by trying to tune all the little things no one talks about. Priming pulse, cranking enrichment, ASE, etc.
If you have time you should read the MS Hardware manual and the TunerStudio manual. The amount of different things going on inside the ECU at any given point is kind of crazy when you think about it.
It seems like these little things don't make much of a difference, but it lets you eliminate all those little annoyances and makes the car more pleasant to drive. Once you add them all up you end up with a much smoother experience
Guess I'm obsessed too! Like a kid tearing at things, I've been playing around with those startup and acceleration enrichment parameters. I have the MicroSquirt Hardware manual but not TunerStudio's. I need to get.
the factory ECU had an overly elaborate (yet easily escapable) hot start strategy.
obviously the MS doesn't use the FPR solenoid, but you could mimic the factory strategy in the software
That's interesting: "vapors in the delivery pipe are quickly purged.." Is that what results in what is referred to "vapor lockup"?
Yea, my MicroSquirt/TunerStudio doesn't include that screen. If the MS3 doesn't have either, could someone wrote the code in the program to generate the screen?
Yea, my MicroSquirt/TunerStudio doesn't include that screen. If the MS3 doesn't have either, could someone wrote the code in the program to generate the screen?
