ZFuel

[superlen]

Here's a quick screen shot. I tried to attach inline, but couldn't get the upload manager to be happy.

It's not real pretty at the moment. It's mostly being used to test they system and I tend to splat buttons and crap all over the place just to test this or that. I'll clean it up and make it user friendly towards the end. For now, it's just a tool.

screenshot1 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

This shows about a 7ms pulse being calculated at 4300rpm 100kpa so pretty much WOT. There is no enrichments enabled & the VE table is just total SWAG at this point so who knows if that is an accuate pulse. I'm betting no. The form at the bottom lets me fake out sensor settings, then the realtime code processes, calculates air mass->fuel mass->enrichments->fuel pulse width. After that it sends it back to the main form though the fake communication link and the GUI draws the pulse train & updates some gauges/icons/bar graphs ect.

You can see the two 7ms fuel delivery pulses for this cycle, and the Speed Density cell is light blue in the 5000rpm and 100kpa col/row.

For Stock AFM mode, air mass will be pulled from our Air flow meter instead of calculated via MAP/RPM. The map sensor in that mode will just be used to altitude correct. That will be handy for all of us that start our car in Death Valley and drive to the top of Pikes Peak in one shot, whining about our mileage & smoky tailpipe.

Lenny

[superlen]

Here's another screen shot showing just a bunch of settings and calculations. Unless you're tweaking the system quite a bit, none of these will ever be touched, but they are needed to test the combinations. This screen needs a lot of work to make it easy to find the right option/configuration and understand what they do. For now, they are just lumped into one big scary screen of numbers.

screenshot2 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Lenny

[superlen]

Fortunately, both the 260s have triple Webers.

Now you're just teasing. Cruel... I tell you. haha.

[rcb280z]

Wow, yes plug and play would be the ticket. I bow to you. If this could be done to my 77 280 and it not change the "emissions" appearance then I am ready! CA is very strict even when it comes down to the "visual" inspection. If you lived closer I would loan you my 280 for testing Yah I know, wishful thinking . Anyway like I said I'm in.

[Captain Obvious]

Nice update Lenny.

If I were doing something like this, I would write everything in assembly and do it without a pre-packaged operating system. For reliability (and liability) I would want to know exactly what that processor was doing at all times.

No RTOS, No high level languages. No optimizing compiler. Nothing open source. Nothing fuzzy... I would want complete control over the horizontal and the vertical.

Funny Work Jokes: Funny Software Engineers on a Plane

At a recent software engineering management course in the US the participants were given an awkward question to answer. "If you had just boarded an airliner and discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible for the flight control software how many of you would disembark immediately?"

Among the ensuing forest of raised hands, only one man sat motionless. When asked what he would do, he replied that he would be quite content to stay onboard.

With his team's software, he said, the plane was unlikely to even taxi as far as the runway, let alone take off.

[superlen]

I hadn't realized how strict CA was but after fielding a few questions about Zfuel from CA owners, I am beginning to understand. Zfuel would work very well for you "race" application in California. I'm sure no one would leave it in place during testing at the smog shop.

I'm in Arkansas and we have very few regulations on emissions. I'm sure there are some, but no one knows what they are. Out there, does the law state you can't have ANY modification to your fuel/emissions system at all that aren't factory? Even if it actually improves emissions greatly? Just thinking out loud, technically you could extrapolate that to disallow any vacuum hose that isn't from the Nissan factory. There is obviously quite a jump from vacuum hose to ECU, but both would be a form/fit/functional replacement.

Lenny

[Captain Obvious]

BTW - I'm not poo-pooing what you've done. I think it's awesome.

I'm just telling you what I would do.

[rcb280z]

Even if it's an improvement it doesn't matter to CA. They don't allow "tampering" with the stock components.

[superlen]

Captain,

You obviously have a lot of the same background as me from your comments. FYI, there's nothing open source, nor any RTOS. I personally really hate developing firmware within an RTOS environment. I understand that there are places where it's useful, handy, & faster to market....but I'm still a lil' old school. However, not so much that I still write everything in assembly. I did hold onto assembly as long as was feasible, but many of my clients don't care about C vs Assy & it just costs them more for me to write in Assy so I migrated to C quite a few years back. The original code I wrote for this in '93 in fact was 100% Motorola assembly.

The firmware that runs in the car is written in straight C (not C++) with just a little bit of assembly at startup. It's also all my own C code so I do know exactly everything that's going on, no third party libraries or objects. Oh, and no fuzzy logic was harmed in it's creation.

Side Note:We have a project going on at work that are the controls for large water treatment systems, such as cooling towers, industrial chillers, large public pools, ect. It is like Zfuel in that we read a bunch of inputs & flow rates & such, and then control pump deliveries of acid or similar chemicals to control the target. Much the same stuff as Zfuel, but way more boring. Anyhow, the customer requested a fuzzy logic loop for controlling PH is really large pools and OMG it makes your head hurt. And testing is all but impossible as we can't have an Olympic size pool in the shop, no matter how much I want one.

The GUI is in C++ and of course has gobs of third party libraries/objects for graphic widgets and what not.

Lenny

[superlen]

Captain,

I didn't read anything else into your post. I knew where you were coming from. I also happen to agree with most of it. (I would do the beer thing Icon if I were smarter).

RCB,

How do they define tampering? Such as my example of non Nissan factory vacuum lines? Obviously I think any sane person would agree that the ECU going from 1977 analog to 2012 digital *might* be considered tampering in the first degree. I'm just wondering how/where they draw the line. I'm not saying it's good/bad either way. Most laws/regulations have at their base a good reason (or at least they did when they started). I was just interested in how they determine if you are a "tamperer". It's quite the foreign concept here. We don't even have to have our car inspected to see if all the lights/horn/ect work. We did back in the 80s, but not now. You just go to the dmv, pay your money, prove you have insurance, and they give you tags. You can of course get a ticket if you are driving around with something broken.

Lenny

[Captain Obvious]

You obviously have a lot of the same background as me from your comments.

Haha! No kidding. Our controls were used prominently in petrochemical, waste water treatment, food processing, steel and other metals... Oh, and Jack Daniels. :laugh: And almost everything was Motorola based.

So everything embedded you wrote everything yourself in C. I'm feeling better. I've got a software engineer buddy who scoffed at me the last time I mentioned assembly. He says I'm out of touch and that the compilers of today are so much better than they were even ten years ago. He says there's really no reason to write in assembly anymore.

My back of napkin sketch included something from the Microchip PIC24 family. The smallest and simplest part I could get that had at least a 12 bit A/D and enough channels to digitize the analog stuff. Then I had a beer and used my napkin to catch the condensation, and I haven't seen it since...

[rcb280z]

I installed a cold air K&N air filter assembly and they told me to put the original air filter on it! I had to do that to pass emissions. Stupid I know but it happens. I think as long as it can be hidden I should be ok. It's worth a shot.