December 18, 2009

I am still alive

Filed under: Uncategorized — NefMoto @ 2:55 pm

I know it has been a very long time since my last post. I have managed to do some posting in the forums, but haven’t had time for a blog entry. I will try to do a few quick posts and let everyone know what I have been up to.

To some it up though:

  • Free ECU Flashing Tool is 95% done. Hopefully I can release it in the next few weeks. I know I always say that. The tool will allow you to read the ECU info (part number, etc), and allow you to do a complete write to the ECU. Reading the ECU and doing partial flashes to the ECU will come shortly after.
  • My car tuning is coming along slowly. I am running a stock MAF with 60lb injectors. I have the AFR down to 11 under boost, and max boost is set to around 18psi. I have some idle misfires to sort out still, but other than that everything runs great without having to hack anything like the calibration/correction maps, or underscaling the load.
  • My data logger is working well. It still doesn’t have any graphics, just logs to a CSV text file. It is still running really fast, but I had to make a few adjustments to some of it’s settings. It turns out that if you do too many 254 byte reads from the ECU above 4000rpm, then the ECU crashes and reboots. It’s pretty scary when it happens on the road at WOT. 😛

October 23, 2009

Web, Web, and More Web, a little WPF

Filed under: Uncategorized — NefMoto @ 5:34 pm

Sorry for the long time between posts. I have been busy doing some improvements to the website and getting the free flashing tool written.

I started integrating MediaWiki into the website to provide a place for all of the reference info to be stored. Forums are great for discussion, but it is hard to provide clear concise info in them. I ended up doing some changes to the site layout to work better with MediaWiki; you may have noticed the site is now full width, rather than a fixed column in the centre. These changes necessitated me spending some more time learning some trickier CSS techniques. Then of course there was all the timed needed to reskin MediaWiki to look like the rest of the site. The wiki is almost ready to go, but there are a few bugs I want to get fixed before I fully integrate it into the site. Camden has been doing some awesome work adding some initial info to the wiki. Once it is completely up and running I hope to spend some time writing some in-depth info for everyone.

As for the free flashing tool I promised everyone, it is still coming along. All of the flashing code is done, now I am just working on the UI. I’m sorry it is taking longer than expected, but I want to make sure this is a really good tool. I don’t want to release something that is a hack or half complete. Currently I am moving my code from C# with Windows Forms to C# with WPF, and this little free flashing tool is my first basic WPF app. It is definitely easier to get started with a new system on a smaller application, then trying to move my all my old code over at once. The reason I am moving to WPF is because it natively supports 3D rendering, and I really want to get away from the Managed DirectX I am using currently.

My car is still not tuned, since all my time goes to the website and flashing tool at the moment. Hopefully once the wiki is launched, and the flashing tool is done I can go back to tuning for a little while again. And after that I will start thinking about what tools to release next…

September 28, 2009

It’s all about speed

Filed under: Uncategorized — NefMoto @ 11:09 am

For the foreseeable future, it runs as fast as it is going to.

I was able to getting data logging up to 26 reads per second of 254  bytes each time. My previous best was 25, so not as much of an improvement as I had hoped. This was accomplished by sending the next read request immediately upon receiving a read response. Then doing all of the parsing of data and updates while I am waiting for the ecu to respond. My profiling data seems to be pointing towards the USB latency as the limiting factor in the data logging speed, and there isn’t much I can do about that since I already have the USB latency values tuned for minimum response times.

As for flashing times, I was able to apply the optimizations for data logging to ecu flashing. Previously I was able to flash an update to the ecu in 47 seconds. Now with the timing optimizations I can do an update in 28 seconds, which is pretty sweet. Hopefully I will be able to make this a little faster, but for now it isn’t a priority.

I also did some more work on communication fault tolerance and robustness. I am now able to recover from garbage data ending up in my receive buffers, as well as messages just getting lost. This allowed me to disconnect the cable from the OBD port while data logging, and reconnect it a second later without any problems. Everything keeps running as normal, no need to reconnect or restart anything, the data logging just keeps running. It detects that there was no response to a message, or that some garbled data showed up on the communication line, and it just ignores it and keeps running. Next I am going to test this while flashing the ecu to make sure it can recover. We don’t want anyone to accidentally wiggle the cable in the OBD port during a flash and have that cause an unrecoverable error. 🙂

The next step is going to be user interface work and tuning my car. I have been working on some UI designs, and once I get to work on some of them I should be able to release some beta software to the community. I also promise to start tuning my car again this week now that my driveway is almost done.

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