This weekend was the second annual BC Z Fest, held at the top of Cypress Mountain, followed by a cruise up to Squamish for lunch. This year we had 117 Z cars attend. It was an honour to be asked to lead the convoy of Z Cars up the Sea-to-Sky highway to Squamish, as I was most familiar with the road.
Obligatory teaser of some recent development work on ConsultSpy; testing auxiliary analog voltage inputs with four type-K thermocouples. Here I was looking for consistency between thermocouple inputs and the effect of extending thermocouple wires using regular wire (i.e. don’t do it! Every connection between a thermocouple wire and regular wire creates another thermocouple in the circuit, resulting in erroneous measurements!)
Here’s an update on some of the work that has been going on lately. We’ve been quite busy with lots of new development, and will be posting more frequent blog updates in the near future.
Bosch TMAP sensor input to a stock ECU
We’ve managed to get accurate MAP readings into a stock ECU, streamed back live over the diagnostics port! This is a 3-bar Bosch sensor connected to a 10-bit analog input on a stock ECU, capable of reading of Manifold Absolute Pressure and Air Intake Temperature. This setup is accurate to ~0.3 kilopascals, and we’ve verified it stays accurate under vacuum and 2-bar of pressure.
These readings reflect what is observed by the local weather station and are typically within 0.5kpa.
Took part in this photoshoot with 102 other Z’s this August. It was great to finally get the Z back on the road after a 120k service and injector replacement. I swapped in a set of new style 370cc injectors after having an old-style 555cc fail. I’ll be upgrading back to larger injectors in the future, but for now wanted to get some solid data logs of how stock injectors behave in regards to wall-wetting, acceleration enrichment, O2 feedback, idle and the dozens of engine load (TP) based ECU parameters that are incorrectly tuned in the currently available chip ‘upgrades’ from the big names in Z32 tuning.
When tuning for upgrade injectors, Z32 tuners adjust the injector ‘K’ constant, which requires all of these TP parameters to be adjusted, and unfortunately they miss quite a lot of them. This was my primary motivation for the first release of KnockSpy; to help tuners understand what TP parameters they were missing for the knock control system in their tunes, which were causing the ECU to disable knock control under high load and high rpm.
I’ve been developing and testing a big injector chip upgrade since 2016 that keeps the stock injector ‘K’ constant and instead uses an injector scaling parameter. This allows for the TP parameters to all stay the same and avoids any issues with incorrect engine load parameters.
We’ve been busy working on the knockspy.com back-end, adding a user login and profile system. We’ve added standard email based authentication as well as Google Sign-In, which will allow full integration between ConsultSpy Dash and our cloud platform. The website will be undergoing some more changes in the near future, and we will be updating our product catalog once the back-end is complete. Thanks for you patience!
Here’s a preview of the next version of the ZROM Firmware Assembler. Lots of new features have been added, including syntax highlighting, a hex editor to view the .bin output, line numbering, symbol cross referencing and data type meta-data.
We’ve also added hundreds of unit-tests to ensure that the assembler output is accurate for every address mode of the HD6303 instruction set and that all opcodes are emitted correctly.
Knockspy.com is being migrated to Azure Cloud hosting, we’re adding a user registration and login system with a cloud storage back-end for our products. This will enable some powerful capabilities in the future, so please bear with us while we upgrade!
The next iteration of ConsultSpy is progressing, now with digital dashboard and gauge display.
Digital Dashboard with gauges, customizable layouts and min/max warnings
Presets for vehicle specific groups of data monitors, such as Knock, TPS, Acceleration Enrichment
Touchscreen UI with left/right swiping to quickly change layouts
Reskinned front-end
Google Play Billing integration. Licensing is now handled entirely through the Google Play store, without the need to purchase through PayPal. Four feature levels are available, Free, Basic, Tuner and Pro Tuner.
Connect sequence, using the touchscreen to show/hide gauges and set a maximum warning for RPM.
Touchscreen swipe to quickly change layouts
Adding a live data monitor for a Wideband O2 UEGO sensor, connected to a 0-5v aux input on a Nistune ECU.
The next build of ConsultSpy has some significant changes behind the scenes including a new connect sequence and status indicator lights on the main screen.
The main screen has indicators lights for the following:
The Z32 has a redundant idle detection system that utilizes both a
soft-switch and hard-switch as described in the factory service manual on page
EF&EC-15. The ECU relies primarily
on the soft-switch and falls back to using the hard-switch only when it detects
a fault in TPS operation.
The soft-switch is calculated in software by the ECU and determines idle condition based on changes in TPS voltage. It has a self-learn function that remembers the lowest TPS voltage and compares the current TPS voltage to this every 10 milliseconds. If the difference between the current TPS voltage and self-learn voltage is less than a (small) threshold value, the idle condition is turned ON. Conversely, when the voltage difference goes above this threshold, the idle condition is turned OFF. If the TPS voltage goes lower than the self-learn voltage, the ECU re-adjusts the idle self-learn voltage to this new low value. The ECU falls back to using the idle hard-switch only when the TPS sensor voltage goes out of range. The allowable range for TPS operation is between 0.04v and 4.82v. If the TPS voltage goes below or above this range, a TPS error state is triggered. If this error occurs repeatedly over time with the vehicle at speed greater than 4km/h, an ECU fault code 43 will eventually be triggered.
ConsultSpy can be used to monitor TPS idle operation using the Throttle Position, TPS Voltage, TPS Min Learn, and Error State #1 data monitors.
Idle hard-switch fall-back operation:
Soft-switch self learn readjusting to a lower TPS position as the minimum TPS voltage drops
