I took Irene out for a day of fun and testing in Pueblo Colorado today. This is the closest road race course to the Denver area and its very accessible to the average car enthusiast. The course is 2.2 miles long and uses a drag strip as the front straightaway. The drag strip allows for some pretty high speeds with a hard braking zone at the end, and the rest of the track is fun and flowing with some slight elevation changes that make things interesting.

Since the last track day, Irene has picked up at least 100hp, and a front brake upgrade. What a huge difference these two mods made. I had way more fun than anybody should have in a Volvo station wagon today. The new Wilwood brakes are 4 piston aluminum calipers that clamp a 12″x1.25″ 2 piece rotor. I never had a problem slowing the car down with these new brakes. They were really impressive. And with the new motor improvements, I was reaching about 120mph on the front straight sometimes. This is about 15-20mph faster than the last time I visited the track. I didn’t get many laptimes, but somebody on the sidelines said I was running slightly under 2 minute lap times. Which isn’t blinding fast, but its good for a station wagon with me driving. Its the fastest I have been around the track so far.
Here are some video clips from the day.

http://www.denverspeed.com/movies/Tim_pueblo_oct_2007.wmv

http://www.denverspeed.com/movies/ken_pueblo_wagon_driveby.wmv

http://www.denverspeed.com/movies/rich_motorcycle.wmv

This next one is a repeat of the second one above, just more compressed and on youtube.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=fh08H_9zrns
The car ran great all day and brought me home safely too. I don’t have a trailer to haul my car to the track, so I just drive and race and drive home afterward. If the car can take this kind of abuse, I have a feeling I might be able to enter the Canonball Run for 2008.

My competition for the day.

I had a pretty good day today. It was one of those days that makes all the long nights and swearing in the garage worth it. Watching your car perform like it should, and even better than expected is a great feeling. Here is how things happened today.
I finally felt like I had Irene working well enough to take her over to the local dyno shop for some serious open throttle tuning. My expectations were not astronomcal. Realistically, I thought the motor was capable of low 400hp range after tuning and with enough boost. But I really didn’t plan to push it too much today. I really needed to just spend some time tuning the AF ratios and timing with the feedback you can only get from repeated dyno runs.

So, I wake up early on Saturday morning, and load some small tools and a couple cans of 100 octane unleaded into the back of Irene. My dad is visiting right now, and he is helping me with the chores and a couple minor adjustments in the morning before we head out to Starbucks for human rocket fuel. Its good to have my dad around for this kind of stuff. We haven’t really done much like this for quite a few years since we live far apart now. My dad has been selling new Volvos since 1973, and he’s a true Volvo lover. I can tell he has been talking up his boy’s wagon to the cronies at the dealership, so he is ready to have some hard data to go home and brag about Irene. There will be some good stories to tell for sure. I pull up to the dyno shop at about 10:15am, and there are several friends waiting there to see the action too. I have my own little cheering section it seems. The guys at the shop immediately strap the car down and get her ready for me.
My goal for the day was to get some good tuning time, and end up with a safe driveable tune for the road race trip planned the next weekend. If I got a good hp number at the same time, that would just be icing on the cake. I had a previous best of 248 hp with the old smaller turbo, so I was sure I would make more power than that. But I;ve been working out alot of problems over the last 2 weeks. So when I made the first run, and the dyno operator tells me 490hp, I was a little skeptical, but very happy at the same time. Over the next 6 runs I tuned the fuel and timing maps; The maps needed quite a bit of work. I left the boost level alone, as it is controlled by the spring in the Audi wastegate right now, and not too easy to change. I resisted the temptation to raise the boost level, even though that evil voice in my head was telling me to run MORE and MORE boost. So after just a few iterations I was putting down 500+ hp. And when the smoke settled, I ended up with one very nice pull of 519hp. Here is the graph.

http://www.denverspeed.com/gallery2/d/17233-2/dyno_519.jpg

I am a bit skeptical about the calibration on the dyno. But any way you look at it, I’m certainly over 400hp. I was very pleasantly surprised it ran as good as it did. The new big turbo is obviously changing the power band way more than I would have imagined.
Here are some more photos from the day.

We also made a few pulls with my buddy Tim’s Porsche. It made a whopping 580hp on this dyno, but was having tire slip problems. It was tough to get this car strapped down tight enough for a good true number.

Really, this was one of those epic days I’ll remember for a long time. It is probably that Irene will make more power in the future. But this day really caught me off guard, and opened my eyes to what a proper sized turbo and header can really do for a motor.

Every once in a while I get something to work right. My Volvo project Irene has really been keeping me up late at night with an ongoing ignition problem. I think I finally have a working solution now. Its not the perfect ignition system that I was shooting for. That would have been sequentially fired coil on plug setup using the Honda CBR coils I bought. But the engine runs smoothly, and revs no problem all the way to 7000+ rpm. So, I’m pretty happy. It only took a few months to get here. But really, I have never had a good ignition system on this motor. I always had a 5000rpm flat spot, and had to keep the boost down below 14psi or so with the old distributor based system. So, I’m hoping I can get past those issues now. So far things look promising. 400hp here I come!

Look at this nice smooth RPM line! It looks so simple, but that took alot of hard work to achieve.

Im thinking of trying the entire EDIS ignition system to cure my misfire problem. Here is some good reading on how this system works and how to get megasquirt to communicate with it.

http://www.bgsoflex.com/mjl/mjl_edis_summary.html

Here is a good example of EDIS and coil on plug ignition.

http://www.hbci.com/~tskwiot/2002_MSII.html

I need to make a few modifications to run this ignition setup. The megasquirt board needs a couple changes, and I need to wire in the EDIS module. I hope this improves things.

here is the edis wiring

I really felt the need to write some stuff down. I’m piecing together some evidence for sorting out this ignition misfire. I have been working on some sort of megasquirt related project for the last 4-5 months. It has been keeping my car from running for quite some time. Well, now, I finally got everything installed and ready to go, and it doens’t want to run right. At first, it seemed to have a 3500rpm rev limit that I talked about before. I haven’t fixed it 100% yet, but it has now moved to a higher rpm, about 4500. So here is the list of things I did to fix it so far.
1. added a 0.1mF capacitor between pin 6 on the opto-coupler and ground. This was to stop false triggers.

2. I adjusted the dashpot for the VR sensor circuit on the ms-extra daughter card with a multimeter. I probed the two pins you can reach from the top of the board, and set the resistance to 35 ohms. This was almost the lowest setting I could get out of the tiny pot. This also matches what I think is the values given in the megamanual for the same circuit. Though, Now I suspect that the daughter board is put together differently than the megamanual schematic. This could be the problem for all I know. There aren’t any potentiometers in the mega manual VR circuit.
3. New spark plug wires, F150 wires, trying to kill radiated noise.

4. Rebuilt the crank sensor bracket, to make it stiffer and flex free. The old sensor had touched the wheel a time or two.

5. Added a 12v noise filter to the power line to the ECU.

I was having multiple problems throughout this. But I think the one thing that effected the misfire the most must have been the bracket work? And strangely, moving the sensor farther from the teeth seems to have improved the signal quality more than anything else. Its at about 4mm now, with the highest rev limit I have had.

I have a thread going over on the MSextra forum. http://www.msextra.com/viewtopic.php?p=170838#170838

—— Here is part of a thread on the LM1815 chips, and how to switch their modes. —————

Following a conversation with mad max, I have designed a small board which has 2 LM1815 VR conditioner circuits and 2 ADC conditioner circuit. The VR circuit also has a jumper for pin 5 allowing it be left floating or tied to either ground or 5V to allow all LM1815 modes. The ADC circuit has the bias resistor, 2 caps, and another resistor to allow the different configurations.

The board has the same size as my p&h board (4″x1.1″) and will fit in the last slot of the standard MS case. Since the components are lower than on the p&h board (no big sense resistor or big diode), the dual VR board should fit in the lower half case under the MS board. I, of course, haven’t verified that since the board is only a design at this point.

This board is mainly targeted at MS V2.2 owners who want to use MS1/extra but don’t want/need all the features from the error* board. It can also be used with MS2 (MS2 code, microsquirt code, MS2/extra code) and/or MS V3.0 for an additional VR input and the ADC inputs.

Before I have this board made, I wanted to know if there was any interest in such a board. If I see some interest, I’ll have a batch made. The board will be about the same price as the p&h board ($18.).

Let me know what you think.

Jean

—-

I used this circuit, but grounded pin 14 to use it in zero crossing mode.
You might provide instructions to bridge (or replace with jumper) the capacitor that is tied to pin 14 if users want to use it that way.
Also do you have plenty of power supply bypass capacitor? The datasheet calls for it, especially if the IC is required to clamp large VR signals.

HTH

Peter

—–

Peter,

I used this circuit as the basis for the board (2 of them):

So there is one power supply bypass capacitor for each LM1815N and according to the schematic above it should be 0.1uF and they correspond to C3 and C7 on my board. The datasheet is very generic in what is required and I’m not familiar with the typical VR sensor signal range. What did you use for your bypass capacitor and do you think 0.1uF is ok?

And thank you for the suggestion for the zero crossing mode.

Cheers,
Jean

——–

I suspect .1uf is large enough for most applications. I was having some issues that ended up not being caused by the Vr conditioner and used 10uf in parallel with .1uf.
_________________
Peter Florance
First Fives Dictator for Life
81 BMW Euro 528i w/ 3.5L & Megasquirt Programmable Fuel injection
81 BMW US 528i (”Repo Car” purchased from bail bondsman)
mailto:peter@firstfives.org

—————-another reply———–

The schematic of the board is here (again click on the pic for a larger version):

Please note that R1, R2, R6, R7 are 1/4W resistors which means they are on a 0.4″ pad spacing and all other resistors are 1/6W resistors which means they are on a 0.3″ pad spacing. The capacitors are all on a 0.2″ pad spacing.

The BOM given in the MSextra manual gives Digikey part numbers for 1/4W resistors and not all the capacitors have the correct lead spacing so be careful to verify this before ordering parts. I’ll have a more complete BOM soon but for now the resistors needed have part numbers that finish by QBK-ND for the 1/4W while the 1/6W part numbers finish by EBK-ND. Please contact me if you need the part numbers before I have posted them.

Also, be aware that the values shown on the schematic for R5, C4, R10, C8 may need to be adjusted depending on the mode chosen, the wheel type, and the target RPM. Also, R2, R7, R10, R11 may not be needed (or may need different values) depending on the VR sensor type (R2,R7) or if the VR circuit is directly connected to th CPU or not (R10,R11). R1 and R6 may also need to be changed to a new value depending on the VR sensor. All these are explained in more detail in the LM1815 datasheet.

The resistor and capacitor values for the ADC circuits will need to be determined depending on the sensor type used. Copy the values used on the MS schematics for the sensor used. In most cases, not all components will be needed.

I’ll post here and on my site the additional information on the part numbers.

Cheers,
Jean

——————- This looks like an important one. —————-

I have this old MS1 V1.01 board; looks like home HVAC system from movie Brazil with all it’s add-ons (VB921, homemade flyback, LM1815 all bolted to case).
I never really tried it with VR sensor after LM1815 modifcation, but broke it out, jumperd to Mode 2 (pin 5 to pin 8; mode you used) and drove it home last night. Pulled as smooth at my V3.00 board. I don’t believe there is any load resistors; I’ll check my component values, I may have used what I had lying around.
Note this is Bosch VR sensor using yellow as positive wire.
The Bosch as a lot of signal and mode 2 is good for it.

From datasheet:

MODE 2, PIN 5 CONNECTED TO V+
The input arming threshold is fixed at 200mV minimum when device pin 5 is connected to the positive supply. The chip has no output for signals of less than ±200 mV (i.e. 400mVp-p) and triggers on the next negative-going zero crossing when the arming threshold is has been exceeded.

Nice find, coyoteboy!