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well ive been fighting the holley the last few weeks and finally convinced them to send me a new screen. i had to buy the usb cable and it works perfectly with a laptop, so i cant figure out another answer besides defective hardware.
unfortunately while testing the laptop logging, i found the limit of third gear. i was only at 7.5psi of boost.
I am picking up a new one tomorrow morning and will take this one apart for an autopsy and start exploring ways to make it stronger. so far my internet research led me to exactly zero information on rebuilds, upgrades, etc. for AR5 transmissions. luckily rock auto has a bunch of the internals listed.
andrew, being one of our resident Holley experts, have you ever heard of logs stopping themselves? I finally managed to post on the Holley forum for help. I got the car making boost last night and it’s back to stopping the log right before 4000rpm. It’s really frustrating because I’m just beating my new motor to death trying to get logs to make sure everything is right and it’s just not working. Rf noise was mentioned so tonight I’m going to remove the dash and run the wire out the hood and into the side window so it’s away from everything to see if that helps.
Sorry for the late response. I have never encountered issues with the logging stopping randomly. I have many customers who take logs regularly for me to evaluate, and this issue has never come up.
I find that most things that people want to blame the ECU on is actually poor installation and poor wiring practices.
Sorry for the late response. I have never encountered issues with the logging stopping randomly. I have many customers who take logs regularly for me to evaluate, and this issue has never come up.
I find that most things that people want to blame the ECU on is actually poor installation and poor wiring practices.
Andrew
I agree, though i pride myself on doing high quality wiring, that point is completely moot in this case since none of the wiring was done by me, its all holley-built. the screen plugs directly into the holley harness. the car runs fine so i dont think its the ecm. the screen shows that its logging but it will stop incrementing the file size and the log opens up just fine, its just lacking any data past whenever it decides to stop working, usually around +- 200 rpm of 4000 and at high throttle. i wasted $55 on the usb cable to narrow out the ecm. it logs fine on my laptop, i went WOT past 6k multiple times in a single log, which I have never been able to do with the screen.
Such a cool car! If you can figure out a solution for the VR to square wave signal, I'm sure that you would have a buyer from just about anyone with a Terminator X and T56.
the board i made should work, its the same conditioner everyone is using inside their ecms. mine seems to work fine as long as im moving but at zero mph its really noisy. I think its because the board is down in the trans tunnel and plugged into the holley gpio connector, not inside or right next to the ecm. I think its having a hard time driving and holding all that wire high. I put a few additional pull up resistors on it and that didnt help so the next thing im going to try is a new chip with 5k pullups and install it right next to the ecm.
A few weeks ago i shattered third in the transmission.
I had a new one for $350 the next day and got it slammed in but then just kinda lost interest in the car and didnt drive it again until today.
After a bunch of calls, I managed to convince Holley to send me a replacement 3.5" TSLCD for the terminator X. I tried it out today and 3 out of 4 pulls it stopped logging, so i still have no closure on that issue.
before asking Holley for a new screen I bought the $55 cable and my laptop successfully logged so i was convinced my screen was the problem.
at this point im kind of at a loss on what to do. I was planning to buy the 6" pro screen but if i cant even get the screen made for the termx to work, i dont want to give them another $1000 and have that not work either. I also hoped to upgrade to a dominator next year.
It seems like it has to be a noise issue, but the ecm, harness and screen are all from holley, i didnt build any wiring and the car doesnt have anything else on it except the ecm and some headlights basically.
the motor doesnt hiccup and the gauge display on the screen functions properly and smoothly, it just gives up on dumping data to the log file.
Have you done any updates on the software? I know my buddy was having a similar issue. He did a software update on the laptop, and I believe that fixed it. Make sure you don't have any time limits or size limits for your logs.
good thought but ive updated and reflashed everything numerous times. when i log on the laptop it seems to work fine, but i really cant stand driving around with my laptop plugged in. so yes, that would be a solution, but a big driver for me going with holley (and efilive in the past) is the ability to log and flash from a standalone device and tune at my desk instead of in the florida sun.
as far as time and size limits on datalogs as far as i can tell thats another one of the easter eggs holley doesnt tell you about the termx. it doesnt have any of that. nor does it have math channels in the log software, or any kind of trigger event to stop a datalog.
im probably just going to order up the 6" pro dash and chuck the little one. if that doesnt work maybe it all goes in the trash for a ms3 or something. i was really excited about the holley ecosystem too, but i wanted to try it out for a grand and not derail my project before i spent the big money on all the dominator stuff.
do you have litz wire grounding your engine block to the vehicle frame. Most vehicles come this way stock, with a large (8 gauge ish) ground to power the starter and a piece of litz wire to provide a path for high frequency noise. Helps to reduce the noise impact of the plugs/coils firing.
never heard of litz wire?
I have everything grounded to the battery and the coil packs grounded to the heads. ill look into the grounds more, i assumed i had enough.
on a side note, i ordered the 6.86 pro dash this morning from a friend that also owns a dyno. so when i pick up the dash im going to put the z06 on it and see what the 468 makes in florida hp. it made 638 in california on 91.
Litz is just a fancy term for stranded wire that has each strand insulated from each other. Reduces skin effect. I've seen them from the chassis to the block on Fbodys.
there should be a piece of wire that looks like this between your engine block and chassis:
that's litz wire, it's there to provide a low impedance path for high frequency noise. Via skin effect as ddnspider mentioned.
this is pretty typical factory wiring:
i've seen some vehicles where the litz wire was bolted to the block, and some where it was bolted to the heads. My ls1 came out of a 99 z28 camaro, in that car it was bolted to the block so that's what i did in my swap. no issues so far. I also run the factory computer, not holley, so i couldn't speak to that, but if you don't provide this you may run into electrical noise issues.
I am pretty sure there isnt one of those on the car right now. ill dig around and see if i have one somewhere and install it. im not sure this car ever originally had one and i pieced the 5.3 together so i didnt start with anything complete. thanks for the info.
Haven’t driven in a few days but I did have a crappy car club day and cleaned my three shitboxes.
the wagon will be getting Andrews penetrol treatment tomorrow when it’s dry.
well, i dont really drive the wagon much between the covid and its lack of ac in florida summers, but i did finally throw away the worthless 3.5" screen and replace it with a 6.86 pro dash and everything works great. My opinion is there was a problem with the power going to the 3.5" dash since it is powered by the can connector. it was browning out or something. maybe its bad luck or a intermittently faulty harness, but a can <> usb cable with my laptop and the pro dash logs without issue.
im still getting the layout polished up but so far im really happy with it.
As far as the transmission goes, the AR5 is going in the trash can for sure, and i have finally decided on an (attempted) replacement. A ZF 8HP70 from a dodge ram. There is a thread on pro-touring with a guy that did it. he shared just enough to pique my interest but not really enough that its going to be easy.
ive done a ton of research, and there is very little info out there. The pro-touring thread is the only thread i found of someone doing it. Damien maguire has some info on his 5hp45 efforts which was helpful. The only other option i found was some $1000 pcs box that still requires HPT to write to the tcm.
I like a challenge so im going to attempt to do this entire swap myself, and will try to document it here.
Last week i bought a trans and got to work.
i was trying to be careful with the TCM since they are so expensive to replace. It took a while but i managed to pry the cover off of it.
after a bunch of time trying to pry the computer module off the rest of the tcm, i realized that was a bad idea and just started peeling the cover off the module and found this. luckily i didnt do irreparable damage to the pins that interface between the cpu and the outside world.
after spending a couple days figuring out what everything was, i cut all the wires off so i can start inserting my own.
here is the pin map for all the conductors. Luckily all 16 of the external connector pins are connected inside even though only 8 are used. I managed to find replacement pins on mouser so i can reuse the factory connector.
I figured out the solenoids all run on 5v, not 12v.
the plan is to put together a custom pcb to interface it all, and make it all external to the trans so i can make changes without messing with the guts of the trans anymore. The 16 pins in the connector is just enough to make it happen.
i was pretty disappointed it wasnt a more traditional pcb that i could probe and examine. It was covered in goo and glued to the housing, and it was all raw dies not the usual packages you see on most pcbs, which made any attempt to reverse engineer it much more difficult. I tried powering it up and i saw it power up some of the stuff partially but not fully. Hard to tell if it was from my damaging something or it waiting for a can message to wake.
in my digging, i figured out the two speed sensors are 2 wire hall effect. i was unable to get them to output anything useful on the bench. They are 6-18ma current output. when i powered them, i could see the 6ma output but couldnt get them to 'see' anything. i tried magnets and a few different pieces of metal. im going to hook them up and hope they work once theyre inside the trans where they are designed to be. I think i can get away without any speed information, but it would be nice to have it for tuning sake. it would allow measuring shift times and converter/clutch slip.
the park-lock sensor is described as a 'digital sensor' which i havent fully figured out yet. I found 2 signal and 1 common pin. the common pin shorts to ground, and the two signals each have 5-6k ohm to ground on the pcb side of the circuit. i still have more work to do on this. Im pretty sure its not something i should ignore since the parking pawl is hydraulically released, it seems important to know where it is when moving between park, drive, reverse and through gears.
Gauges look good! I cracked open an EBCM in an fbody and it was the same way with stupid dies and bare leads, such a PITA. Good luck on the trans control.
06-22-2020, 09:21 AM
