Is MS still the answer?

[Bowie69]

Agreed, Arduino looks great, but 'just' builds on the MS stuff very heavily, including using Tunerstudio etc, so the differences can't be that wild.

The hardware, as Fridge suggests, seemed much less developed than even a MS1 V3, I don't see the benefit.

 

 

[elbekko]

1 hour ago, =jon= said:

Thanks - I read through their specs and it says they can run high/low/peak hold, but I never got as far as asking if you could do a mix - run half the injectors with one and the other half with the other, or swap based on an external input if you are switching between the two via relay or similar... I'd be interested to see how you get on

Yeah, I think I'll ask for some clarification on that.

[FridgeFreezer]

54 minutes ago, Bowie69 said:

The hardware, as Fridge suggests, seemed much less developed than even a MS1 V3, I don't see the benefit.

So far from what I've seen:

• MS1 on V3 board = Pretty solid, super simple, good enough for 99%.
• MS2 on V3 board = Pretty solid, firmware is mature at last, solves a few little wrinkles from MS1
• MS3 = Horrific dog's breakfast of a thing, far too complicated and the teetering tower of stacked boards is totally unsuitable for bolting into a Land Rover.
• Speeduino = Pretty close "homage" to MS V3 board but you have to jam a £40 Arduino on top of it and no obvious "nice" solution to mounting it in a proper case for use in a real vehicle, firmware appears to be a sort of a cleaned-up cover version of MS1/MS2.

[Bowie69]

They have got better in recent times, with proper cases and some PnP offerings: 

DIY-EFI – Bringing you EFI solutions on a budget

Their plugs appear better on some of the offerings than the MS D37.

[Ed Poore]

I too looked at Speeduino and the thing that really bugged me about it was the insistence of using an Arduino... I'll clarify

I don't dislike the Arduino project - it did a huge amount for promoting STEM / electronics amongst school children and hobbyists but it's main purpose and what it's done really well is to make it simple for hobbyists and school children to get something functional up and running, it achieved that by being simple and cheap and achieved quite a cult following as a consequence. Rather cleverly in my opinion then STMicroelectronics created the so called "blue-pill" which basically put a modern (ARM based) microprocessor into the same format as an Arduino and put in the effort of making it, literally in most cases, a drop in replacement for an Arduino. So you can use exactly the same code base and the same hardware - you just choose which Nucleo (their version of the Arduino boards) you have instead of an Arduino, hit upload and the magic happens behind the scenes. What this allows you to do is use off-the-shelf code and libraries that other people have written for Arduino which is incredibly popular on a more capable chipset so that when you need more grunt you already have it. For example I'll quite often build a proof of concept using a Nucleo board and throwing in a bunch of Arduino libraries if it's software I don't already have. Once the project really gets going then I'll sit down and refactor things into a decent code base if required.

What really bugged me about the Speeduino project (admittedly when I looked at it several years ago) was that looking through the codebase I could find areas that they were obviously struggling for processing speed or space on the chip (because the AVR used by default is quite a weedy chip by modern standards) so they would optimise some quite substantial sections of the code with AVR specific assembly instructions. Now from having spent a decent amount of time writing very high performance code (and occasionally dropping down to assembly to improve things) with modern compilers you will generally struggle to better what they can chuck out. If they'd left it as plain old C then it would be trivial to port to a new platform. In my opinion when they were struggling for performance they should have re-evaluated their choice of processor...

Anyway minor rant over - best get back to some potentially paying work...

[elbekko]

As interesting as the discussion is, I doubt Speeduino will work for my requirements, as it's missing most of the functionality I want.

[simonr]

5 hours ago, Ed Poore said:

I too looked at Speeduino and the thing that really bugged me about it was the insistence of using an Arduino... I'll clarify

Speeduino now supports both STM32 & Teensy.  You'd be daft to use an ATMega for much more than stopping your table wobbling these days!

[Ed Poore]

14 hours ago, simonr said:

You'd be daft to use an ATMega for much more than stopping your table wobbling these days!

At least you don't have to rely on its code execution abilities for that 

[elbekko]

On 9/20/2023 at 3:43 PM, elbekko said:

Yeah, I think I'll ask for some clarification on that.

Said clarification:

Quote

That's something I may have overlooked actually. 

The Haltech ECU can support both high and low impedance injectors, but it cannot change settings on the fly. 

It's common in LPG applications for the Haltech ECU to only continue controlling spark. 

i.e. injector outputs shutdown, but the LPG is injected via it's own injection system. 

The Haltech controls ignition timing still. 

Otherwise it could be possible map the LPG injectors as as secondary stage with custom stoich value and different injection time based off a switch. 

I guess the secondary stage is what we would want, then. I sent this response:

Quote

Eliminating the second ECU for the LPG is one of the main reasons I'm looking into an aftermarket ECU, as they are terrible things that give nothing but issues. I realise the Haltech won't be able to do gas pressure adaptation, but that's alright, it's a very minimal effect anyway, and should be compensated by the AFR anyway.

 

Running it as a second stage sounds like a decent option. With an Elite 2500 that means bank fire for both systems, right?

 

We'll see what they say. They usually respond the next day, I'm guessing timezone related due to them being in Australia

[Ed Poore]

Have you looked into the Link series of ECUs?

[Ed Poore]

On 9/20/2023 at 11:53 AM, elbekko said:

Apparently tuning the gearbox control isn't easy (guy said 2-3x harder than fuel map tuning), and really should be done by an experience tuner on a rolling road.

Is it a terrible idea to say "how hard can it be?" and do it anyway?

There was a guy called RRPhil on the Land Rover forums based somewhere up north who was basically the gospel on all ZF auto boxes. He used to design auto boxes for a living if I remember correctly and then decided to set up his own shop refurbishing ZF boxes for Range Rovers (mainly from the L322 era). I can't remember if he's still going or decided to pack it in but it might be worth trying to find out? He was fairly active on fullfatrr.com.

[Ed Poore]

On 9/20/2023 at 3:19 PM, FridgeFreezer said:

Speeduino = Pretty close "homage" to MS V3 board but you have to jam a £40 Arduino on top of it and no obvious "nice" solution to mounting it in a proper case for use in a real vehicle, firmware appears to be a sort of a cleaned-up cover version of MS1/MS2.

 

17 hours ago, simonr said:

Speeduino now supports both STM32 & Teensy. 

These two comments make it kind of interesting now. When i head to the office I'll revisit it but if it's basically a plug in board for the Nucleo stuff then it won't take long to spin out a board with the chip on board.

I've got a decent stock of STM32F423s which should be more than powerful enough to run it. I knocked out three boards (from schematics to populated boards) that combined are probably on par if not more complicated than the Speeduino one in a couple of days last week. Beauty of being able to etch stuff in house. 

[elbekko]

5 minutes ago, Ed Poore said:

Have you looked into the Link series of ECUs?

Not in much detail, but at a quick glance it doesn't really wow me with better features.

3 minutes ago, Ed Poore said:

There was a guy called RRPhil on the Land Rover forums based somewhere up north who was basically the gospel on all ZF auto boxes. He used to design auto boxes for a living if I remember correctly and then decided to set up his own shop refurbishing ZF boxes for Range Rovers (mainly from the L322 era). I can't remember if he's still going or decided to pack it in but it might be worth trying to find out? He was fairly active on fullfatrr.com.

I remember him from rangerovers.net (before I was banned). Could be worth asking.

Or if someone just knows what damn CAN messages the autobox ECU needs, I'll just build a translation module... over the years I've even amassed several CAN-speaking devices, just never got around to doing any sniffing.

[landroversforever]

2 hours ago, elbekko said:

I remember him from rangerovers.net (before I was banned).

Rather OT but sounds like a story?!  

[elbekko]

3 minutes ago, landroversforever said:

Rather OT but sounds like a story?!  

Actually not even that OT!

One of the admins was putting an LS into his P38, and piggybacking the LS ECU on the GEMS, so the rest of the car wouldn't freak out. I was trying to convince him the car barely needed any feedback from the ECU, and it would be trivial to just connect those wires to the LS ECU. Not sure anymore about the exact interactions, but I remember telling him to get his head out of his behind, and then I was suddenly banned

We've since proven with @Escape's MS that it is indeed perfectly doable (even though it isn't running in the current car yet, it has worked in a different car).

And also why I'm convinced integrating something like the Haltech shouldn't be too difficult. Just need something that meets all of my requirements, and isn't going to be worse than what I have now.

[=jon=]

12 hours ago, elbekko said:

I guess the secondary stage is what we would want, then. I sent this response:

We'll see what they say. They usually respond the next day, I'm guessing timezone related due to them being in Australia

I was looking at doing similar with the MS3 - run the petrol bank from the onboard injector drivers, then run an external injector driver off the MS3x injector drivers, with a switch to swap fuel/spark maps and the injectors over. I even got as far as buying the external drivers, but never got round to it. I think the external drivers may have needed modifying as well as the peak/hold currents for LPG are different for P+H petrol injectors..

[FridgeFreezer]

Running 2 sets of very different injectors should in theory be quite straightforward, I'm assuming it's a rare enough thing that no-one bothered writing sensible code for doing it.