I have a hydra 2.5 currently but looking to going hydra 2.7 for the long term trim feature. I will admit I'm lost as far a tuning is concerned so other than basic concepts I'm learning it's all greek to me. So while the the car is down for the motor build I'm looking at the upgrade or the megasquirt. The hydra seems to be an amazing system ( or atleast for the $ it should be). However there is more support here for he MS than the hydra. The more I learn about Hyrda the more I get the feeling they are more into $ than a good product. Just a notion. Is there any advantage for the MS vs Hydra? Looking at the site the upgrade and the upper/new MS is around the same $. My #1 need is ease of use for noobs and this will be my daily for going back to school. Hence the longterm trim want. #2 I don't mind tinkering and learning but need to make the car usable ECU wise after screwing around with it on the weekends. The long term trim seems useful if I don't get the tune perfect and need to go to school the ECU will adjust for a few days till I get back in it. maybe my inexperiance screams here but any info would be nice. Searched but found nothing definitive.

 

If you don't know **** about tuning then why are you going to pay hundreds of bucks just for a LTT memory?

If I were you, I would just keep the hydra at 2.5 and run it. It will work just fine. You don't need that LTT. Just run closed loop off a narrowband and it will hit your AFR targets AOK. Save your money.

I believe in MS, but the reality is that most users have to do much fiddling to get things working properly. With the Hydra, Jeremy has already done all that fiddling so **** just works and all you have to worry about (for the most part) is fuel and timing.

 

I've read your help from another forum Fae and it was helpful. Lately time and energy hasn't gone toward the car so tuning hasn't either. Moving, school, and wedding have been higher priority. I shouldn't say I'm tuning retarded, just compared to most of you, an infant in it. My question may come out better as, why do more people go MS? What makes the hydra a better/more expensive route? There are a lot of people with a good amount of money in their car so a few hundred bucks between ECUs wouldn't skew the curve so far one way. So if someone had the money for both what would be better? I spend a decent amount of time reading the forums consistantly and haven't come up with a real argument other than to agree with Fae, I don't have to spend my weeks fidiling with it to make it work.

 

With the latest units I'm building, all of the settings are already dialled in, down to injectors and cranking pulsewidths to start your car. So literally, all one has to do is plug the ECU in, verify timing and TPS calibration and click autotune to start tuning the car. AFR target tables and ignition tables are already setup per my experience tuning lots of local Miatas.

 

Sounds good. Obviously then, your plug and play experiences with any EMS comes down to the support from your vendor. I've known some people who have the hydra but did not buy from FM and were pretty much in the dark.


I am not familiar with what MS3 etc can do out of the box but I know that the hydra 3D maps have much higher resolution. I don't know what that means when it comes to driveability but theoretically it should mean more smoothness and definitely more tuneability. Techsalvager can confirm this, but I think that MS does not have knock sensing out of the box. Hydra also charges a fuckload for all their upgrades to fix **** that's broken... like minimum injector dead times.