When Well Enough Can't Be Left Alone; Backdate, EFI/ITB, AC, and more!

[Jonny042]

Originally Posted by jpnovak

Some say his blood runs with pure molten magnesium and he drinks beer through an MFI pump.

LOL!

One thing is for sure, he's a class act!

[Joesmallwood]

Awesomeness! It's great to have a community like this that is knowledgeable and willing to help!

[al lkosmal]

Julian,
Glad that you two were able to identify the likely source of the miss/stumble. Hard to debug sometimes.........and you lucked out by having Jamie stop by to lend an experienced ear/eye/ hand. He is who I reach out to, when I get stuck.

regards,
al

[Showdown]

One of the coolest things I'm discovering about EFI is DATA! There is so much data that can be collected and analyzed and in those logs lies all the answers one could ever want about these engines. The trick is a.) knowing how to sift out the signal from the noise, or at least where to look in the data and b.) knowing how to affect change.

Jamie is a wiz as are so many folk here. I feel really lucky to have access to all these experienced and helpful people.

Here's my rotor and Pertronix... Yeah, time to replace!

[Showdown]

After Jamie’s visit things were looking up… until they weren’t. More driving and collecting data revealed that though we had made huge improvements something was still wrong.

I replaced the shot Pertronix, 45 year old rotor cap and eventually, after failing to source the correct part from 3 different stores, I replaced the rotor with a resistor-less version courtesy of Rutager West... This community I'll tell ya... so cool!

More driving and data logging and texting with Jamie. We started brainstorming all of what could go wrong and eventually hit a eureka moment. After looking at the wiring schematic I was following Jamie caught an error; the Pertronix was wired incorrectly. It needed to connect both with the MegaSquirt and the MSD. The schematic had it going directly to the MegaSquirt and ignoring the MSD which made for all sorts of confusing headaches as my dizzy is still controlling timing and not locked out which means that the MSD needs to be connected. If the dizzy were locked out and MegaSquirt were in charge of timing the wiring schematic would have been fine. Eventually I will change how my engine is timed but for now, one mountain at a time.

I said to hell with work, tore open my harness and began correcting the wiring error. It only took 15 or so minutes; I’ll attribute that to my fine wire organization

The goal this weekend was to take the car on a weekend road trip with my brother to Southwest Michigan (Bridgman, to be specific) where my family has a weekend house. I wanted to rip some of the rural roads, go hiking, eat indulgently, drink too much and just get away from my life for a minute. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to retune the car and didn’t want to chance getting stranded in Gary. So, the car stayed home.

The mini vacation was great and aside from tearing up some roads, all boxes were checked.

On Monday morning I returned home and had a few hours of time to play with the car. I took it out to a stretch of road I used for left-foot dyno tuning and started the process of mapping the fuel, something that I've become really proficient at lately.

In a matter of 20 mins everything had changed. The car was idling steady, ripping to red line in all the gears, AFRs were pretty close to where they needed to be and all of the stumbling and misfires were gone. It sounded raw and aggressive, responded to the throttle like a rabid dog and felt like a real 911. There’s still fine tuning to be done and of course I have to address how I'm going to change the timing this winter but hot damn, it feels like the storm has passed and the fever broken, and right now, that feels like everything to me.

I figure we have until early December until there's a snow worthy of salt and then the 911 goes to bed for the winter. Until then I have some miles to accumulate.

[al lkosmal]

Julian,
I am glad that you are finally over the hump......The wiring was configured for you to use the M'squirt to control both fuel and spark.....you can lock out the mechanical advance and that works well....but you do not need to lock out the dizzy for this to work well.....I have had good results using the mechanical advance and then you just use the m'squirt timing on top of it to get to the curve you want and you don't need to worry about rotor phasing, etc....it is similar to when people would install carbs and then send the distributor out to be recurved.....you just recurve using the M'squirt advance table.....I've had this done on the dyno with very good results.
That being said.......I'd leave it , drive it and enjoy it.......you have it running well, with Jamie's help......it is a good system and you will love it, moving forward......later, you may wish to have the added flexibility of the ignition control, but I will bet that you will not miss it. ......now you get to the fun stuff.



regards,
al

[chrisbalich]

Julian,

Stoked that you and Jamie got your car sorted out.

I would agree with you that getting stuck in Gary is a bad time.

I would agree with Al that maybe it would be most prudent to leave the EFI/timing as it is and just enjoy the car for a full season before delving further into ignition modification. I have found that sometimes restraint goes further than ambition when it comes to cars.

[jpnovak]

This is most true. Get the car running and enjoy it as long as you can. You did a great job on the backdate. So...

Drive.
Show.
Smile.
Rev.
Repeat.

[Gabe.]

Hey Julian,

Glad to hear that you've got the car running well enough to just enjoy it for the next few months!

EFI usually has some consistent fiddling to get it set up right but at the end you know so much about how engines operate it's hard to consider that a disadvantage (if you're a fan of learning new things).

[Showdown]

Well it's been a minute...

The past few weeks have been a bit hectic and I wasn't able to get much seat time. That all changed this weekend; a 70 degree bright blue sky Sunday that saw me with the WHOLE. FREAKING. DAY. to myself. So I drove.

And drive I did.

I took the car out for 6 hours and drove up to Lake Geneva and then the Driftless area in Wisconsin, just West of the Dells. I took a rallye route from the Ferrari Club of America with plenty of twists, turns and elevation. Side note- I can't imagine the Ferrari drivers ripping down some of these roads with the way they seem to baby their cars...

In any event, the car was marvelous. Simply marvelous.

No misfires, no stutters, no lagging, no issues whatsoever.

It was the first time I have driven the car without the laptop hooked up- not logging data, not looking at AFR, MAPdot, or pulse width, just driving. It was in a word, a revelation and all of what I had hoped would come of this project when I started the EFI/ITB conversion. I couldn't care less about HP or TQ numbers, I'm not tracking this car or competing in anything, and the change from CIS (even with the CIS pistons and cams) is pretty remarkable.

Oh, I also added a JBell 10k tach, because why not. The other gauges will et silver dots this winter.



And I added a proper "license plate" to the bumper with my father's airplane tail number. Though I am tempted to throw it on the hood... hmmm...

[rwest]

Congratulations Julian!

I’m a bit jealous too, I know I will get there someday as well.

Maybe next summer we meet up near the Dells, must be about the halfway point between us.

Rutager

[al lkosmal]

Julian,
Congratulations....all of the hard work has paid off and now it is time for the fun part. I admire your DIY, roll up the sleeves approach......it ain't always easy, but if you keep your head on straight through the debug phase ( you never know what that will reveal) the end result is worth it......and your 911 is stellar.

regards,
al

[jpnovak]

Julian,

this is most excellent to hear that your car is running well. So glad you never gave up and that you are now enjoying the benefits of the conversion.

Hope you have a continued Fall weather and lots of miles over the next many weeks before those winter snow days set in.

[chrisbalich]

Hell yes, Julian!
Sounds like a banner day.
I'm hoping to sneak in some more miles before the salt comes...but I know our time is fleeting.

[na2ub]

Thanks for sharing! I'm working through the conversion currently - at the clean up the old CIS engine wiring loom phase, now, so I have a way to go.

[Showdown]

Well, it’s been a while since I posted to this thread. Life got really bad, then really good, then some more bad and now it’s just whiplash between the two. That is to say that motivation, focus and time all waned this fall. I drove the car a bit more but really didn’t have the time to do much fun stuff.


Today marked not only the best day of the year (more sunlight than yesterday) but also in a cruel twist of fate, the first winter storm that dumped a few inched of snow on the entire Midwest. And along with single digit temperatures came the salt. So, the car is effectively garaged for the next few weeks if not months. Perhaps once the

roads dry out I’ll be able to take it for a drive; as long as the salt isn’t mixed with water or snow I’m not terribly concerned about it.


In any event I did get an hour last weekend to work on the car and I decided to tackle two totally unimportant projects that I’ve actually employed a surprising amount during my short tenure with the car; tow mounts/tie downs.


This car has been on a flatbed like 5 times!


I ordered some front A-arm tow mounts and a rear engine case lift bracket/mount from JManPorscheParts. They were priced ok but in all honesty, with the ease of CAD and Send Cut Send I could have made them for a fraction of the price and they would have a.) fit better and b.) been exactly what I wanted. In any event, it took a bit of labor to get them to fit and I had to cut down the rear tow arm as it was too long for my likes (I may cut it down more) and modify the jack bracket so it actually fit. Thank goodness I have a mill!


Anyhow, photos:















Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[chrisbalich]

Ahh the age-old tale of bolt on parts that don't quite bolt on.
Good to see you still tinkering and improving.

Now let's keep those recovery points shiny and new by not using them in 2023!

[Showdown]

So, aside from some menial projects when time allowed I haven't been doing much with the car other than looking at it. That said, I haven’t been totally away from projects. In fact I want to share one that I’ve been tinkering on for a few months.

I’m running a MegaSquirt and that allows me access to a litany of data streams when running TunerStudio on my laptop. The only problem is that I can’t really run my laptop in the car all the time. Many people add small touch screens to their dashes or cars so that they can access that data but that was never an option. Even though I have EFI I don’t want the cockpit or interior to give that away. So, what to do…. Well, get creative, that’s what!

Like so many others I decided that my clock wasn’t really adding anything of value to the driving experience and a perfect place to put something else. Jamie Novak has a digital gauge that provides all sorts of data from his EFI, Chris has one for his AFR sensors, and many others have variations thereof.

But I wanted more.

The developer of TunerStudio recently released a lightweight, fast loading version of the software called TSDash that was designed to run on a Raspberry Pi. It has all of the features I want with none of the bloat; it's basically only for creating digital dashes and data logging, not tuning the MegaSquirt. It's far from perfect but for the time being it's pretty close and as it's part of the TunerStudio family anyone who uses TS will be able to hit the ground running. Another cool aspect is that it can data log every drive automatically and overwrite the old files like a surveillance camera and with 256GB on the SD card I doubt that will fill up any time soon. On top of that, you can use your laptop and TunerStudio to connect to the Pi and TSDash remotely (basically SSH) to download those data logs, to add screens, change the configuration and do a bunch of other stuff, making it pretty flexible and dynamic.

First step was to procure a Pi 4.0 with 8gm of ram. Way overkill but at a whopping $45 who cares.

Next was sourcing a screen. Off to Alibaba I went and ultimately found a 2.8” TFT touch screen with 480x480 resolution. Better still was that the manufacturer offered an HDMI board for it for $10. I bought two with boards for $80 shipped.

The initial tests were positive and I was able to get the Pi running on the small round screen. TSDash had no trouble running on the Pi and after designing Porsche-style gauge faces I was feeling really good about this!

And that’s where it started to get complicated.

I needed a way of cycling though the 6 gauges I wanted… At first I considered using the touch screenbut I nixed that idea quickly. I couldn’t have a mouse or trackpad… I thought of a scroll wheel down by the parking brake like modern cars have but that wouldn’t cut it. So off to Adafruit I went and procured an Arduino Micro board that I programmed to act as a single key command (command+left arrow) which would tell TSDash to scroll through the gauges. I wired up a momentary push button to the Arduino so that when it was pressed the key command was sent via USB to the Pi. In effect, I made a single button keyboard that has one action. Perfect.

The next challenge was power. A converter was able to take the 12v DC and convert it to 5v AC to power up the Pi. That was never going to be an issue. It was the powering down that was problematic. See, you can’t just unplug the Pi or kill the power as that will eventually corrupt the SD card and all your hard work will be gone. The Pi is a computer and needs to be shut down through software. But I don’t want to do that because it would mean having a keyboard or another dedicated button to turn it on and off. I just want it to come on when the car starts and turn off when the car turns off… duh!

Luckily someone has thought of that and so I purchased an ATX-Raspi, a little board that will allow the powering on and off of the Pi safely with a physical switch; they are primarily used for video gam simulators where a slide switch is used to power on/off the device. But wait, Julian, you said no switches.

But what is a button other than a way of delivering a signal…. And there are other ways of delivering that same signal. By using a Bosch relay I was able to tap into the ignition-on power source to send a signal to the ATX-Raspi that looks to the board like a button. That is, when the car turns on, a 12v circuit is completed and that trips the relay to close a secondary circuit on the ATX-Raspi board which is exactly what a switch would do and that in turn tells the ATX-Raspi to either instruct the Pi to boot or to shutdown via software. Cool stuff.

No what to do with all of this stuff.

I 3D scanned the bezel of one of the small gauges, modeled it up and 3D printed it. I printed some retaining rings as well. I sprayed it with high build primer, sanded it and sprayed it with satin black paint and then matte lacquer. I then hand rubbed it so the finish better matched that of my other gauges- somewhat burnished by touching over 45 years and a little imperfect. I cut a round piece of glass and started assembling it all.







There were a lot of boards and wires to work out. The HDMI board mounted to the back of the display as did the Aruduino button board, Then all the connecting cables had to be plugged in and dealt with. Eventually I made a back the gauge and sealed it up.





The Pi will mount under the passenger seat where I can tap into both always-on power and ignition-on power. Then I’ll have to run 2 x micro USB cables and 1 x micro HDMI cable up to the gauge to deliver power to the Arduino and power and HDMI to the HMDI board.



The button was then installed in the intermittent wiper hole as I relocated that knob to the radio delete panel.

So, there it is installed, it looks like it belongs and when the car is started so too will the Pi and the screen.





I can rotate through the gauges (AFR/target AFR, Voltage, TPS/Accel enrichment, MAP-DOT, Oil Temp/Warm up enrichment) with the push of a button and if I want to add more gauges I can do so remotely with my laptop as TSDash is network enabled.



But wait, photos don't tell the whole story. Here are some videos of me cycling through the screens and one of me driving just to prove that it actually works! you'll notice that the button is taped up because I dropped the lock ring and couldn't find it and didn't have another one handy. I have a bunch at home and so next time I'm at the studio I'll fix it...






Now, though this works, it's a lot. I have 4 boards, a power supply, a relay, a button, three cables and three wires all to deliver a gauge. There must be another way. And there is!

I’m currently working on an Arduino-only based solution that takes all of what you just suffered reading through and condenses it onto one board. The Arduino will have software on chip so powering on/off isn’t an issue, it will startup in about 1 second, it’ll all fit behind the display and be elegant AF.

The problem I’m facing is that I’m not a professional coder and my C/C++ is rusty as an old 911. In addition, I have doubts about the Arduino’s ability to display the graphics as fast as I want. There are some workarounds like only animating the needle as a series of still images, or vectoring the needle and I’m sure there’s a solution but I’m not sure if I’m that smart. I’m looking for a developer to assist but the biggest issue is that if they don’t have access to a MegaSquirt and a car it’s really hard to develop and debug. In addition, and this may be the biggest obstacle; getting these esoteric Chinese screens to work with the Arduino has proven to be a bit more complicated.

If anyone here is an ace with C/C++ and Arduino and wants to team up to figure this out with me I'd love to talk details... shoot me a PM.

But I figure I’ll get there eventually, or not…

[rswannabe]

That digital multi-gauge is freaking awsome! Very cool project! I would SO use that in my cars (megasquirt as well). Unfortunately I have zero programming skills to help you. I would buy one or two if multiple are made.

[pampadori]

Does megasquirt have a CANBus setup? I admire your ability to build and code something to achieve this. Well done!

I've been using a BTI gauge in place of my clock and love the ability to see all parameters with the touch of a button. Makes it easy to monitor and troubleshoot while driving.