NefMoto

I feel like I have been trapped and held hostage by tuners.

Long story short, I have had an early ASP stage 3 kit on my 160,000 mile 2000 S4 for about 4 years and 40k miles.  The early tune was awful on Cali 91.  My car pinged like crazy, ran rich, had boost control issues, the whole nine yards.  Moving to Arizona didn't help.

Mark insisted that there was something "mechanically" wrong with the car.  I knew this was not the case. 
I was bitter and unhappy with the way the car ran. My friend with an identical setup was having similar issues.  I'm sure most of you are aware of all the ASP drama, but long story short, Mark ended up making good 3 years later and my car has been running pretty decently on the last revision he sent me albeit with an MBC in place of th N75.  There was nothing mechanically wrong with the car as you might have guessed by now.

But anyway, I am seeing E85 stations popping up and I have full intentions of converting the car and tuning it on E85 before I make the step to gt28's...

That's where this forum and the "S4 tuning project" comes in...

I'm looking forward to helping in any way I can.  I have worked on some fun projects with serial communication with CNC machines and .NET in the past an feel I may have some beneficial knowledge to contribute.



Things I'd like to accomplish soon:

reliable flashing

remapping

lower the fan temp triggers

increase throttle sensitivity/response  (it appears this would be a function of remapping the throttle position to requested load)

add some additional dashpot  (I have a ceramic twin plate clutch and this would make the car a bit easier to drive on the street since my clutch and flywheel weigh nothing)

eliminate my cold start issue (more on this later)



If this project ever gets to the point where we're able to actually change the software and behaior of the ECU I am interested in the following additional functionality:

real-time map switching
2 step for launching
perhaps a discrete output to control meth injection conditional on IAT's or something else.
perhaps a discrete input to switch to a more agressive boost profile/ignition map (think push to pass)



Anyways, great to see this gaining momentum!


Jason

I feel the same way. I have never been happy with a tune I bought from a tuner. Now that I understand the inner workings of the ME7 code I know why. Every tune I have bought has been a hack. Tuners have also blamed my car when their tunes don't live up to their promises.

At the moment I am working towards releasing some of my software to some beta testers. I am currently able to reflash, edit maps, correct checksums, basic datalogging, etc. All of my knowledge comes from disassembling the ecu code and reverse engineering the algorithms. With this knowledge my next set of planned features include real-time map switching, and real-time editing of maps.

Glad you could join the forums. Please hang in there as everything here gets started.

I agree would be able to tweak things to my own liking.

Jason I am not sure that you can control fan turn on temps, I believe that they are controlled by a fan module, could be wrong though... ;D

I am glad to be here!

I'm pretty sure the fans are not controlled by the ecu. In all of my ecu disassembly work I have never seen any reference to fans.

One thing I have been thinking about for the future though is re-purposing the post cat O2 sensors. The sensors are only used for catalytic converter efficiency testings, so they aren't really needed. In my own car I have completely removed them and just have the loose connectors sitting in my engine bay. The sensors have an analog voltage input for the sensor, and they have two digital outputs I believe for the heater and amplifier. These could be reused for some other general inputs or outputs.

if only a 0v-5v reference could be used to log widebands like we spoke of earlier.  they are 0v-1v though :(

True, the existing narrow band post cat oxygen sensors are a 0-1v signal. But they should be wired into a general purpose 0-5v input in the A/D of the processor in the ecu. The existing post cat oxygen sensor code in the ecu is only written to read 0-1v, but there is no reason you couldn't read 0-5v if we change the code in the ecu.