PS I didn't buy this ecu, it came with the car on the 1.6 turbo setup. Life happens and I can't currently afford/justify a ms3pro like I know I should get. That being said I'm going to find a way to make this work. I know it's not the best but it is what I got.

 

Okay guys so I've been playing around with the car on my laptop. I turned off AFR correction to see what that did. It starts up and idles but oscillates a little. after about 10 seconds the car dies. Every time. I think it may be dieing when ASE ends? I'm not sure. It also seems to be running super rich. It doesn't like quick throttle input it will die. I'm not sure where to go from here but I'm playing with things and trying to see what they do. Tune and Log attatched.

 

ASE duration is adjustable, so yes, could be

 

@Ryfrog I'm not sure why, but something seems to be increasing VE around 10 seconds. From what I can tell the car is dumping more fuel there and causing the car to die. That could be due to the idle VE cells (see below). For some reason your coolant, MAT, AFR and voltages don't seem to be logging correctly (at least for me).

It's generally considered good practice to set all your idle cells in your ve table to the same value. That should clean up the oscillating. You will also want to lock those cells when autotuning to prevent them from getting screwed up.
For you that would probably be the bins under 50 KPA and 1200 RPM. I'd probably rebin the table to get a bit more resolution around idle MAP, but that doesn't matter too much right now.

Your Warmup enrichment is also ending at 99, that should be changed to 100.

 

I am also not sure why I can't figure out why it keeps getting super rich out of nowhere. Tonight I will play with the ve cells and pull some fuel and equal them out hopefully that will get me idling well enough and I can autotune from there to get it driving. I'll also fix WUE. Coolant, afr, and voltage work on my tunerstudio I'm not 100% on mat and I know my IAT on tuner studio stays at 70, not 100% sure what that's about yet. I have the sensor hooked up and I know if its getting no input it defaults to 70 but I'm not sure how to tell TS to use my sensor for that.

 

Okay so I made the changes and it was running really good. Took it out for a quick drive and tune and it was tuning and getting better. I got my idle smoothed out and consistant, but it's still very rich. Noth sure what is causing that. The rest of the tuning seems to be fixing it's afrs correctly. I'm going to drive it to work in the morning and see how the 30mi trip goes and tune.

 

Fwiw my car didn't want to idle above like 12 afr when it was running batch injection. Sequential allowed me to idle much leaner and smoothed out cruising when going on and off throttle.

Glad those changes seem to have helped. Seems like you're headed in the right direction.

 

Any idea when that firmware is going to get put into the master? Are you still running the custom one @simba? I might look into flashing that if it will let me run sequential. Did you have to rewire anything or does the new firmware figure it out from the cam position sensor on the front of the 99 head? Idling at 10-11 is far from ideal in my eyes.

 

Yeah, I'm still running that custom firmware. I should probably push to get the trigger pattern included.

Someone merged that trigger pattern into a more recent version of firmware. I'd probably move to that, as the firmware that I have contained another bug that I had to patch. I know some people who have run sequentially on the 4-1 pattern.

I believe on an NA you would need to add a couple wires for the 3rd and 4th injector signals, but I could be wrong. I know there are writeups about that on here.

 

Just wanted to chime in and ask/say a few things. Not trying to derail the current tuning discussion though.

Is there any reasoning on purchasing that turbo? It looks awesome next to the comparably small engine, but it seems like better decisions could’ve been made in terms of spool for your power goals. Regardless, once the tuning issues are resolved I’d be really interested in seeing a datalog of the boost threshold in a tall gear.

Are you running the stock valve springs? I’m not sure what amount of boost you plan on running or when it might become an issue for the stock springs but I was slightly concerned when I didn’t see aftermarket springs included in the engine build. Boost pressure will counteract the force of the spring, which could be an issue depending on the rev limit and/or the amount of boost that you run.

Regardless, you’ve got a really unique and cool build. Hoping to see more updates in the future

 

The turbo choice had a lot of variables. I knew I wanted a "nice" ball bearing turbo as opposed to the journal bearing China charger I had on the 1.6. Flyin miata used this turbo on their stroker motors, and I saw faefloras dyno results and they looked very acceptable to me. In addition I chose the cx racing manifold because I knew it would keep the turbo in a similar position so I could reuse my downpipe and at the time I thought possibly turbo as it would keep me at t3 if I couldn't afford the garret in time. I also couldn't afford the newer genII or an efr. Hindsight 20/20 I should have gotten an efr and vband everything, but at the time of purchase I understood how to make this work and not that so I went with this. I am running a 14lb spring (two 7s) in my IWG75 with 3 port 3ebc hooked up but duty cycles to 0 for now. Might bring up duty cycles for spool later, but going to target 14psi until I can figure out a transmission solution. My goals are around 300whp which this turbo should hit and have plenty of headroom for when I get stronger trans and maybe brakes. Money is an object unfortunately. If it makes under 300 on 14psi I'll probably still leave it until I can get stronger stuff. Then 400 will become the goal. Also yes stock valve springs stock 99 head. I was under the impression I would be fine with stock rev limit, but if not lmk.

 

Well guys I don't know what to think right now. Took the car to work yesterday and autotuned a bunch. 60mi round trip, the car got better and better and everything was going great. I was so excited to be driving it. When I got home I did the next oil change to 10w40 conventional oil. I spent the rest of the night messing with the idle and getting it smoothed out to around 14.0:1 and 1000rpm. I was finally pretty happy with it so I went to bed. Get up this morning for work and the car will not start. If it does start it's missing or running super rich. Something funky is going on with enrichment to where it wants to run super rich for a while with weird tapers that I don't fully understand yet. I tried everything it seems like this morning to get it to go. I went through everything I touched yesterday, I reverted tune to when I knew it worked yesterday morning, Nothing works. I called in today so i have until monday morning to get this dialed in. I really need my car to be a car again. It's very frustrating because I thought I was finally past this. The car was behaving beautifully yesterday. I don't understand what happened :(

 

You know the drill, tune and log

My bet would be something mechanical, like a sensor got unplugged or maybe the crank sensor got loose.

I don't know all the details of your car, but if you want to reference my tune at all I've got it posted here.
​​​​​https://tunes.speeduino.com/#/t/Pl8M...gine_constants

I'm no professional but it might help you ballpark some figures. At least with my ff640 injectors I find that they want little to no warmup enrichment, as the injectors seem to flow a lot more fuel when cold.

You'll get there eventually. Your car might not start perfectly everytime, but you should be able to get it to at least start everytime without too much fine tuning.

 

Okay guys so it was mechanical. It was not crank sensor related. It was my spark plugs. I pulled 'em out and they were BLACK. I've never seen plugs this black. Tried to ground one and spark it and it was sparking very irregularly. Threw new plugs in (BKR7E as opposed to the 6f extended reach plugs that were in there might go back but town had these) and it started right up. As happens with any build some bolts rattled loose, lines came undone, etc I've been fixing all of that as it appears. I've fixed a lot more than I have posted about because it's normally as simple as re-tighten, maybe add a lock washer, or reattach a hose. In driving and tuning I have found that it does great under half throttle but boggs and gets crazy rich under full throttle. like 8:1 and car bogging. I believe this is an issue with my acceleration enrichment. My TPS is a 99 vtps, and the resolution is awful. I have good connections in my wiring, I'm not sure why it is so bad. It will jump from 0-12ish percent just idling even if I set the TPS with a buffer. It is also not smooth. I am not sure if this is normal for NB TPS's as I had a BMW TPS on the 1.6 and it was smooth in tuner studio. This one isn't. It isn't the sensor I have tried multiple. I think I may have to switch to MAPdot. When I put it in MAPdot mode the car is much happier to respond to quick throttle input at idle. I haven't driven the car configured that way yet. Anyone have any ideas on how I can smoothe out my tps signal, or where to start tuning MAPdot enrichment? Additionally I have noticed that to get to a 13-14.7 idle I need to put my idle cells in the ve table to very low values such as 18. I have not seen anyone with a map with that low of values in idle which makes me think I am doing something wrong. Do I need to set other numbers higher so that it knows that the same number is actually lower reference? If I set 1 cell to say 250 and keep the idle cells higher it seems to lean it out a bit which is nice, but I don't think I should just have 1 cell crazy high like that to fix this.

I think that is all for my spitballing questions and randomness. Now to the car. When it's driving it's amazing. I'm so happy to have the engine that I put together actually work and be able to get me to and from places. It's a feeling not quite like anything else. Driving it, hearing the sounds, feeling the rumble, everything makes me smile. I've been loving this car, just can't wait to get things buttoned up. Need to get the tune dialed in. I've decided I'm going to de-power my steering rack one of these days, I'll probably pull the pump and loop lines very soon until I have time to do that. In the future I'd much like to get big brakes, seats, harnesses, and a quick release. A transmission is also high on the list. Probably leaning towards a 6sp as I cant exactly afford a BMW swap. For now I'm very happy driving it as is. The tune seems to get better every time I drive it, and I'll probably try MAPdot tomorrow and see how that goes. The goal line for smiles per gallon is finally arriving.

 

First off, good work on finding the issue!

The idle VE could have to do with the Required Fuel value in the Settings->Engine Constants menu. There is a little calculator in that menu, so you might double check that your value is appropriate for your injectors and engine size. I believe that value just scales the VE table. I haven't messed with it much, but I've heard people say you can adjust that to make your table values more reasonable (IE not super high or super low).

I had some really erratic AE issues where my car would dump fuel when cruising because the TPS noise would cause AE to trigger. I found that a filtering value of 128 worked pretty well to allow AE to be effective without trigger erroneously. That's in Tools->Set Analog Filters.

Glad to hear you're back to enjoying the car. Learning to tune can be a long road, but it's a really satisfying feeling when the car is reasonably reliable and you've built & tuned the engine yourself!

 

I have my required fuel set at 3.0 as per the calculator for my displacement, injectors, and base fuel pressure. I might play around with that filter I'm not sure what mine was set at. That being said I switched to MAPdot for the 30mi drive to work and it worked great. Sometimes it was slightly slower to respond, but it always responded correctly instead of not responding or over responding. Also I was having the issue your describing where it would activate when it shouldn't say while idling or whenever. That's all gone with MAPdot. I got all the way here with 0 bogging/breaking up issues, and I probably went harder on it than reccommended for a break in period but I was so happy it's finally pulling and not breaking up and or bogging. It currently drives better than it ever did with the 1.6 I couldn't be much happier.

 

Okay guys car is running reliably and getting me to and from work every day now. There are still some things to be done and of course no build is ever "finished". I'm noticing that on startup it is revving to about 3k and then drops in about 3-4 steps until it get to idle. Usually this takes 2-3 tries because it will drop, drop, drop, stall. Then after a couple it will drop, drop, to idle. Always revs more than I think it should starting. Not sure where to go to adjust that. I was having hard starts and noticed my cranking advance was 3 and did some research noticed that wasn't great. Changed that to 15 and it starts right up but that's also seems to be when this starts. I've tried lowering it a bit and it still seems to rev. I'm thinking I noticed it after that but it wasn't actually that causing it but I could be wrong. Additionally I'm starting to lean out in cruise. i'm not sure how lean is too lean for just cruising. If I hit the throttle it goes to about 10, then up to about 13.5 and slowly dips to 11 as I get more into boost. That all seems decent to me. Before I hit the throttle If I'm cruising it sits anywhere from 16-19. 19 seems too lean but maybe it's okay for just off throttle/cruising. I am very much no expert. I have been autotuning and it has been getting better as it was drowning itself in fuel before, but I'm starting to worry were getting too far in the other direction now. Another problem(that i planned on fixing anyways but now it's probably going to happen sooner)that showed up on the way to work this morning is my speedometer cable. Did a little pull up a hill to check afr's and such and at the end of it my speedo started being much more jumpy and making a lot of noise. Was scared I blew a turbo or something at first cause It started making noise front left right at the end of a decent pull. After about 30 seconds I had figured out what it actually was. You can even feel it, the gauge cluster has some vibration with the noise. I have an NB cluster from my parts car, NA and NB gauge hood, and I need to get the stuff for speed sensors. I can cut the sprockets on the waterjet at my job, I'll need to buy hall effect sensors, and a decoder board, but I have the raspberry Pi already. I'll also need to swap over my 1.6 oil pressure gauge when I do all of that. The last issue I'm having right now is my reverse switch. For some reason the car thinks it is in reverse in 5th and reverse. It's annoying because I have a backup camera which stops music when activated, So when I shift to 5th my music stops. I haven't checked if it puts the reverse lights on but I'm guessing it does. If not it's a radio issue not a car issue but Pretty sure it's got to be something with the switch down by the trans. I haven't diagnosed this yet but if anyone else has had a similar issue and fixed it let me know what it was.

 

As far as cruise goes, you want to be closer to the 14.7-15.5 range. 16-19 is definitely too lean.

I'm a tuning newb compared to most of the other regulars on this site, so I don't want to throw erroneous advice in regarding your startup and idle settings. It's been satisfying reading your thread and seeing the progress made! And like @SimBa said, there's nothing much more satisfying than driving something you build and tuned.

I've heard of a couple people having an issue with the 5 speed where the trans shifts into 5th and reverse (or another combination of some gear and reverse?) at the same time, but that locks the trans when it happens. Maybe your issue is somehow related to that..?

 

I thought that was the case, I'll bump those cells back up before I drive it home and see what it does. Also it very well could be. It doesn't like to go into reverse sometimes, but every time I do get it into reverse or 5th they both work fine and nothing weird with any other gears. 5th works as per normal but activates my reverse switch. Reverse works like normal but is randomly hard to get in/out of reverse, If that is the case slightly rolling the car usually fixes it. If it wont go in, 1-2 times of going to first back to reverse has been fixing it. I've been reading some other threads on similar reverse issues this morning and it seems it could be a bad/cheap reverse switch, my trans could be on its way out, or my linkage could have something wrong with it. My brothers miata did a similar thing with hard to get in/out of reverse right before it blew so that's uhhhh reassuring..... Another person said possibly shift fork related but I don't think that's my case but I could be wrong. Glad some of you are enjoying this thread. I am by no means an eloquent writer, but I try to keep this updated and you guys have helped more than you can realize. PS I know a lot of the things I talk about/ask about are elsewhere on the forum but it has been nice to log everything here and also sometimes get help.

 

On the topic of starting, you probably want to drop your cranking IAC value a bit so the car doesn't rev up so high on startup. I find it pretty useful to get the car fully warmed up and then build a spreadsheet to get a rough idea of what IACV duty cycle corresponds to what RPM. IE a duty cycle of 40 is roughly 1100 RPM.

There are 2 settings you'll want to look at regarding the step down after start. In Cranking Enrichments there is a taper time, and in idle control. I

My guess is that the car is revving up to 3k on startup and tries to drop to idle values too quickly, so when the car isn't warmed up it dies. I think if you lower the cranking IACV duty cycle to get the car to fire up around 1500 RPM when warm and give it a little more time to taper into idle settings then you'll be better off.

FWIW I have both of my taper times set around 4 seconds and usually have the cranking IACV target something like 3K RPM at the coldest and 1K RPM when warm.

As far as cruising, I will usually see some excessively lean AFRs at transient throttle (IE barely have my foot on the pedal), or if DFCO is active. If you're regularly seeing 16+ AFR's you need to get some fuel into those areas ASAP. Until you're more comfortable with tuning I'd probably target 15 as the leanest value in your table.

Again, I'm still relatively new to tuning, but my AFR table is here if you want to reference it https://tunes.speeduino.com/#/t/Pl8M...g/afrTable1Tbl