My mods are in my sig. There is no dyno on my island so I will be street tuning. Is a Datalogit necessary or can I tune my car through my commander? I have an LC-1 wideband kit and PFC with commander.

 

If you need to modify the basemap, you are out of luck completely and will need to go ahead and buy one.

Otherwise if you're really good with it I would say yes you can use only the Commander, at least on stock twins. I've done it before on stock twins at 14psi. But it is hardly ideal. You can't view logs, you can't display your wideband readout, and the map trace function is difficult to see. Some of the injector staging and driveability settings are inaccessible, while you will have no adjustment over the air temp correction map which is important for maintaining stable AFR's under all conditions. It's also just straight up tedious, especially if you are trying to modify a bunch of cells at once or you are tuning trailing split (which has to be calculated manually and would take forever).

On the other hand, the commander seems to have the fastest sample rate for reading engine parameters live, and it's actually great for tuning idle (through the INJ/IGL/IGT diagnostic screen) if you get good with it. It's not all clunky like a laptop either. Even though I have a datalogit I use it a decent amount to make small adjustments here and there to warmup corrections or something like that. Busting out the laptop all the time for a small change is a pain.

Anyway, both the Commander and the Datalogit are only as good as the knowledge and experience of the user. The Commander is hampered by its lack of functionality. It was never intended to be a full-blown tuning device as Apex'i shops have their own datalogit type thing. I would say if you know what you're doing you will eventually get a rough tune out of it--enough so it will start, drive, and not blow up. But you won't be as satisfied in the end when your AFR's are fluctuating with the seasons and your throttle response isn't as crisp as it could be.

 

Thanks for the info. That cleared alot up.

My goal is 350rwp. Is the $300 that it costs worth it (Given that I am pretty knowledgeable and will be able to tune it pretty good)? The main reason I am wanting to go all out on this and be sure is that this is my 3rd motor and I am running out of money replacing motors. Thanks

 

Yes it is way worth it! It's soooo much easier using the datalogit. Plus you can log your afrs, and look over everything after a drive. Otherwise you will be trying to pass through cells and tune them at that moment. You will not regret getting a datalogit. Plus if you only plan on tuning it once you can sell the datalogit lafterwards and get most your money back. But once you have it you will want to keep it.

 

Thanks for the very usefull info. Do you guys recomend a place to buy a datalogit from?

 

You can find used ones every now and then on the 3rd gen parts section. That's how I got mine. Usually go for 200-250 used. Also you can buy a brand new one from the company

http://www.fc-datalogit.co.nz/pricing.html

 

there is somebody in the US which carries them... I got mine from an FDNewbie group buy a while back though. You can check in the for sale section as well, they seem to hold up decently as used parts.

 

Rotary Performance is the authorized US retailer http://www.rx7.com/store/rx7/fdecu.html#apex

They were running a special for $238 shipped , some sort of Microsoft Rebate deal https://www.rx7club.com/rotary-performance-rx7-com-178/%24238-shipped-fc-datalogit-kit-usb-adapter-803874/