ECU - AFR Targets and Cold Start

Finally the weather warming up to around 8ºC.

~10ºC is my rule of thumb for when driving the Zero becomes fun rather than asking for frozen hands/ears, in the garage I no longer get instant frozen fingers from picking up any metal tools.

A little tinkering with ECU settings.

An employee of Emerald who is active on the GBS Zero Facebook pages has been incredibly helpful with advice and some new settings to try. I also ran another round of cold-start adjustment. 

The current settings are listed in full on the ECU page, broadly the following has changed:

• Some Emerald expert magic in the ignition and injection tables
• Semi sequential injection enabled - so fuelling timed closer to when inlets are actually open
• 850rpm idle column added in all tables - to help stabilise idle
• AFR Target table adjusted for leaner run in the idle/cruising area
• Lambda settings modified
• Cold start settings modified (again)

My primary map has the new flat/economy AFR targets on less than 30% throttle, secondary map remains on the power-map targets,  both still in adaptive for now to let it learn appropriate fuelling.

Target this year is to take the car through MOT early March, so I sync the annual test around summer driving months rather than having to cross that bridge mid season each year.

Starting to think about road trips... couple of ideas on the cards.

Wideband Gauge

Nice sitting down/post Christmas relaxing sort of project - playing with some parts to build a Wideband Lambda gauge/real time readout on the lambda sensor.

Inspired by the work of Jonas Bylund:

I'm making some modifications so my gauge will be a bar-chart and fill from lean to rich - the same direction the emerald software does and because it will give a visual representation of fuelling - more lights = more fuel. The gauge takes the 0-5v feed from the Wideband sensor and is just a calibrated volt meter to show a central 2.5v of that range.

Knocked up the simple circuit based on 3x LM3914 which do all the work, requiring only few external trims, resistors and a pullup system on the LEDs to make the display work in reverse: 5v = no LEDs lit,  0v = all LEDs lit.

Oldschool transfer to a veroboard layout using TinyCAD and VeeCAD - all free! Half the fun with vero is trying to get that optimal layout.

...mocked up part of the circuit to check operation.

This should give me a reasonably accurate 0.1AFR per LED across 30 LEDs - 12.6-15.5 AFR- either in the tested pre-formed units or an array which will let me hi-light specific values with different colours.

Lands End 2016 - Summary & Video

The journey let me visit some of my favourite West Country locations as well as discover a few new ones, a target end point is the excuse I need to get out in the weather and just drive.

The ~700 miles round trip were worth it for this picture alone.

Video

Will be uploading some video to the Youtube channel, don't expect any major editing - more a scrapbook/realtime TV to jolt my memory. Mostly wet roads so certainly not pushing the car and definitely concentrating on keeping the rear wheels where they should be - behind the driver.

I really must sort out the sound - my camera position most of the time has a better view than the driver, but does pick up more whining diff than burbling engine. Perhaps the SJCAM can be modded to accept an audio input?

Happy New Year!