Well, I tried to reply to the sticky on FC Tune, but I would need 5 posts to do that. The only reason I am posting here is to reply to an incredibly insulting and factually wrong statement about my free software, Copilot for Power FC. The person said that there was no error detection and handling and that's just plain wrong. It checks every packet: size, data, and checksum. I've been auto tuning my 2ZZ-GE engine (base map and ignition map) using this software for a couple of years now. I run the software pretty much daily (I have a tablet PC installed in my dashboard). Not once have I seen any indication of a write error. There are random read errors (bad checksum, bad packet size, bad data, timeouts), which I believe are due to something in the Power FC itself. They could also be due to some kind of design issue in the Datalogit box or cable (electrical noise, crosstalk). Anyway, I've seen the software run for hours with no read errors and I've also seen it run with errors every few minutes. Since I uploaded the source code many months ago, I've added more error handling, but no matter what I do, there are always these intermittent read errors. Someone told me that he's observed garbled data going to the FC Commander, too, so this tells me it is a Power FC issue. There are many safeguards in addition to thoroughly checking the packets received, such as having min and max limit "maps" for the base map and a min limit "map" for the ignition timing map. The user specifies the limits in case bad data from the Power FC is not detected. You can also do all the auto tuning working offline and have the opportunity to change things before writing when you do it that way.

But auto tuning is not the main purpose of the software. At one time it was, but I became more interested in adding different kinds of displays. There is a fuel economy display now like my wife has in her Prius. It also has virtual guages, charts, and plots. Street Dynamomometer. Export to Google Earth. 2D plot of your course around a track or on a road. It integrates with GPS and accelerometers. It supports replaying with video synchronization. It has user-defined limits for various parameters like water temperature and knock and will pop up an alert when something is outside the defined limits. It has more features than I even care to list.

I really can't believe that people would be so critical of free software. I've spent an incredible amount of time developing this. Same goes for critics of fasthatch, who is a really smart and dedicated guy.

As to the comment that it is single-threaded, so what? I write multi-threaded real time software for a living (flight simulator software) and have been doing that for over 20 years, so I know what I'm talking about. It doesn't matter that it is single-threaded and this actually prevents certain types of nasty problems from happening.

I thought about adding support for an RX7 platform and started to do just that, but it is difficult to do because of all the differences in the Power FCs. I added support for a few other platforms (other Toyotas, WRX, some Nissans), but it is just a lot of work and there is no return. I don't even have one of these cars (mine's a Toyota MR2 Spyder with a 2ZZ-GE engine swap), so why should I spend hours and hours doing this? At one point I sold the software for $40. People gave me feedback that I had to pay attention to (because they were customers) and the program got quite a bit better as a result, but then I made it free again and uploaded the source code, hoping that someone would add support for other platforms, but nobody did. So either I do it, or it doesn't happen. I didn't start doing this for the money and only made a few hundred bucks for my many (perhaps 1500) hours of work, so you tell me, why should I (or fasthatch) keep doing this? We do it for the challenge, for the fun of it, and for some positive feedback.

I keep going back and forth on the idea of adding FD support. I'd like to, but it takes a lot of time and I wouldn't want to get bogged down in answering the same old questions over and over again. So I might do it (in a limited way... not all features working and not doing any Q&A on it or updating the documentation), but I seriously doubt that I'll upload the (much improved) source code again because nobody contributed any source code to improve it. I wanted an engine sound sythesizer, for example, just for replay. I don't want to step on fasthatch's toes, though, so I have to consider that. Not trying to steal anyone's thunder.

- Kevin