2016 Vintage Weekend

Burgermaster, Vintage Meet & VW Nationals

It was a great weekend of shows. Starting at Burgermaster for good conversation and burgers. Then to Vintage meet for the best Vintage VW's the PNW has to offer and finishing off the weekend at Pacific Raceways for the 2016 VW Nationals. I brought my car out and although it's slow I made it into the 3rd round of eliminations. Not bad after 4 years not racing!.

At Vintage you where greeted with a vast showing of Bus's of all varieties 

 and It brought out the best in town and then some!

On race day the show started to fill up early

During the races I was able to put The Dub Shop ECU to the test (MaxSFI) is what I'm going to call  it. It's about an hour and a half each way to the track. The first pass I made was an 18.009 and I wasn't able to back it up all day.


During test and tune, I made 3 passes. All going a little slower than the previous and I stopped at an 18.2X. I was trying to adjust the launch control for a nice launch but the little 1600 just wanted to bog down.

After a rush to the staging lanes for the start of Eliminations it was a quick 3 rounds. Although I was really consistent during the 3 rounds I lost due to my slow reaction times. I'm going to blame it on the loose suspension :). 

All in all a absolutely great weekend and next year hopefully I can bring a little more power to the track!

-Mario 

Are you ready?

My ECU went into Pre-Order status. I am expecting to start shipping mid May of 2016. I'm so stoked about these!

Pre-Order Info Here

I have been running mine for the past couple months now. During this time we have found a couple areas that could be improved and made changes before the production boards where made. These improvements include some indicator led's on the main board itself for visual reference of the comm channels and the main power input to aid in any troubleshooting and just to know power is getting in. The coil drivers where re-positioned to allow for better mounting to the case, and finally some adjustment to a couple traces on the bottom of the board to allow clearance at the main board mounting locations. I can't tell you how excited I am about this :)

One of the coolest parts about this ECU is the internal wideband controller. I installed this right beside the Innovate LC2 so I could get that side by side comparison. Come to find out it actually provides data just a bit faster than my LC2 is through the CAN buss using the Innovate serial chain. That was a great sight.

In the graph below you can see this. The Pink in the 3rd row is the internal wideband trace where the Red is the LS2. Green in the same row represents the average of the 02 sensors at the 4 ports. This sensor is also set to a lag of 100 which uses no filtering on the signal. If you look at the traces you can see it goes full lean quicker and it also starts reacting first to the reintroduction of fuel. One last thing to note it the long delay form the port mounted 02 sensors to the collector mounted sensors, about 1.5 seconds or 1500ms. You have to take this into account when using autotune (veal), otherwise you will be correcting the current cell for something that happened 1.5 seconds ago...

More info to come, if your interested in these here is the link to get in on the pre-order at a discounted rate!

The Dub Shop ECU

- Mario

The Dub Shop ECU

As many of you know the development of some new hardware has been going on. It's been a little while since I've posted anything about it so here goes.

The most recent work in developing a new ECU has been verifying the that the internal wideband controller is doing what it is suppose to. I have chosen to add an accessory bung into my exhaust for a 6th 02 sensor. I use a CAN-EGT with 4 very proven Innovate LC-2 sensors to collect data from each cylinder already. Now with the combination of the 4 02 sensors at each port I am able to average all the sensor reading and compare that to what the internal controller is seeing at the collector. Cool right! That's what I thought. Check it out.

I know, It looks like a garbled mess. So bear with me. First off I have disables the software filters so this is raw data from all the sensors. In the middle section is the 4 sensors at the heads. My trimming isn't perfect for each cylinder yet but that is ok. It gives us more data to crunch. The top is some standard stuff, RPM, TPS, Manifold pressure and a single cylinder PW just for a reference. Now for the point of this post. The bottom section. I created a calculated field to average 4 cylinders together and named it 'AFR Average', then I made another filed to compare the average to the internal WB controller 'Int vs Avg'. Highlighting a steady state section of my log almost 60 seconds long I was shocked to see that the internal WB had less than a percent error over this period (You can see this in the bottom right box, very last line). I chose steady state because you can then factory out sensor latency from head to collector.



So there you have it. Some good data about The Dub Shop ECU and the internal wideband controller.  It's pretty damn accurate in comparison with some of the best 02 controllers on the market.

See ya all next week, I'm going for a drive!!

CAN-EGT with Probes

Head side bungs

New collector 02 bung

Both collector bungs

Ignition Control

So your new to EFI and want to know the difference between ignition options. I took a little time to scope some output channels to help you get a grip on what the different meanings are and how they will effect you.

The first one is a "Single Coil". Pretty straight forward. You are still using a distributor and firing a single coil. Note all of these are done at 3000rpm and a 3ms of dwell (how long the coil is charged). What we are going to be comparing is the Duty Cycle (DC) of each. With a single coil at only 3000rpm we are charging the coil 30% of the time. This is fine for a low performance stock application. In a performance application you will quickly cut into the coil charging time robbing out output because the coil can't fully charge

Next we move to "Wasted Spark". When moving to wasted spark we now have a coil pack that is capable of firing 2 cylinders at once. Hence the wasted spark, it is fining in an exhaust stoke of the paired cylinder. With this setup you can see how the corresponding outputs are now sharing the load and dropping the DC in half. This allows for a higher RPM and /or longer dwell periods. In 90% of applications this a great choice, the perfect balance of performance and reliability.

IGN-4

After Wasted Spark the next step would be "Wasted COP". Instead of using 2 output channels, we are now using 4. If you are driving dumb coils this would require 4 coil drivers. Wasted COP is the same as Wasted Spark only that we are now driving 4 individual coils. And the looks like this. Alternating between 1+3 and 2+4. This follows the firing order of an Air-Cooled VW 1432. Starting to look cool right? You can see the DC hasn't changed either. Just the amount of outputs. This isn't to common because it's hard to fit coils into a beetle and requires more wiring. On an inline engine this is very common.

COP

Then we come to the pinnacle, Sequential Ignition. "Coil on Plug" (COP) or "Coil near Plug" (CNP). With Sequential ignition we are using the same amount of drivers as we have cylinders. Each output fires a individual cylinder in the firing order. In this case 1,4,3,2. This cuts the dwell of Wasted Spark in half again! Now we can keep our coils very cool and run at an even greater RPM or charge them long enough to ignite 30+psi of boost pressure. This is for the other 10% that need to have the best and want the most control. You will need a Cam Sync to allow your ECU to run in the correct firing order. This is the most complex to setup and tune.

LS2

I hope this has helped you! Let me know if you have any questions. And if you are curious, my new ECU will drive all of these coil options.

-Mario

Mini Cam Sync V2

Today I received some parts for the MiniCamSync V2. It's one of the new features of this new version I want to build. The mini trigger wheel. I originally had 12-1 but my friend Prescott said let's try more. So here it is. Using wire EMD it is tremendously precise. With the inner radius of the teeth a mear .008". The outside diameter of this part is under one half inch as well. It's tiny.

Trying Something New

Hey everyone,

So you found my new Blog. Great! I plan to use this method to get my ideas, new products and projects posted quickly. In the years past I spent a good deal of time in the forums helping learning and expanding my horizons. But as business has grown, time has shrank. With the rise of Social media most of my time is focused on Facebook or Instagram to get information to the public. But I have realized that as wonderful as that is it cost a good amount of money for my post to get very far away from my core crowd. What makes this even tougher is the group that does not use Social media.

I figure that I already have my website I might as well use it a little more and decided to start this blog. From here I should be able to get more information posted even if it's not actual site content. Just a good place to get all my random endeavors in one spot. It's going to take some time to get use to so check back weekly to see what's new.

Thank all!

Mario