So I’m in the market of a new wide band. I have narrowed the choices down to theInnovative LC-1 and the AEM Uego. I was hopping I could get some real world feedback from people who have use one or both of them, to help me decide which rout to go…

Thanks

-Rob

 

We offer the AEM gauge and standalone UEGOs here:
http://www.bmotorsports.com/shop/ind.../cPath/103_107

We don't stock the LC-1 due to production problems, returns, failures, etc. People here will have many opinions and experiences but we don't stock them because they proved unreliable for our customers. To give Innovate the benefit of the doubt, they are good engineers and hopefully they have resolved the product issues.

We also carry and highly recommend the NGK Powerdex AFX. If you do some research on various boards you will find many references to the NGK Powerdex being engineered and produced by ECM Co who makes the laboratory grade equipment used by many of the OEMs and calibration facilities around the world. NGK contracted them to build a product to help offer a good controller to properly utilize their sensor (we offer the NGK Powerdex pre-packaged with the NTK sensor). The NGK Powerdex is most similar to an AFM 1500 iirc which is a $2k+ controller.

 

Thanks for your input... anyone else have any experiences?

 

there was a testing done on most of the major brand of widebands that somebody posted a while ago

aem did very well compared to the others it only drawback is there is no datalogging future

do a search and you can see all different results

 

My lc1 failed after a couple of months. I have emailed innovative over and over with no response! im sick that i spent so much money on something that doesnt work!

 

i love my aem

 

I have two AEMs in my cars, maybe soon to be a 3rd in my truck and they work flawlessly. I had an LC1 once upon a time and ditched it. Since I have heard of so many problems with them that I don't recommend them ever.

 

The LC-1 is probably the most accurate wideband you can get. The major problem and flaw is no one ever hooks them up properly, and thus, has problems. If you hook them up like they're supposed to be hooked up (12v switching/all grounds to ONE ground soldered together and grounded to the block/back of a head) you will not have ANY issues. You also need to run a 5amp fuse inline the power wire. Other wise, most people don't spend the time to do it right and fry them. People just don't want to spend the time to do it right, and i was one of them. I hooked one of mine up lazily and fried the DAC on it. I hooked the other one up properly, and it runs flawlessly without a hickup. So, if you want to get the most accurate wideband, and are willing to go the extra mile to wire it in correctly then the LC-1 is a good choice. If you want a wideband that will definitely get the job done with much easier install the AEM would be a better choice for you.

 

I also love my aem uego, its a really nice setup. they are also like 200 shipped on ebay, well worth the money.

 

You are kidding right? Have you ever looked at their message board for all the problems that everybody has? Don't give me this I didn't hook it up properly, it really isn't difficult and if somebody has difficulty doing it they shouldn't be doing simple wiring. Do you really think that the wideband needs to be grounded to the back of the head?

I really wonder sometimes how rumors like this get started and passed around as fact.

 

LOL, yes, it really does need to be grounded to the back of the engine/head. Don't even start arguing about it, its been done time and again and fixes all of the grounding issues. Like its been stated so many times, the LC-1 is very sensitive to a noisy ground. So, if you don't use good quality wire, wire an inline fuse and don't ground it to the block you will have problems with it, PERIOD. So if you did not ground it to the block, that is most likely the reason why it wasn't working right for you. If wiring it in for you was so "simple" you probably didn't do it right. It takes a little more than just twisting some wires together and slapping the wires into your O2 sensor harness's or your cig-lighter inside your vehicle.

Maybe you should do a little more hands on research before you start saying that something is "rumor passed around as fact". FACT is its already been proven, the block is the BEST grounding source, and if you do not use it with the LC-1, you risk an alternate ground not being up to par.

Nice webpage btw.

 

Sorry,
If a normal seperate chassis ground does not work than the product is junk. It's pretty stupid to assume that all these failures were due to bad grounds, and I know the difference between a bad ground and a good ground. Wiring is not something new to me. I had both a nice new switched power wire and a nice chassis ground and after 3 months it gave up the ghost and I had to send it in to get repaired. After I got it back I got another week out of it before I started to get fluctuations in a/f readings yet again on their gauge before it completely died at that point. This was not a ground issue nor a power issue and it's been this way since they came out. If a company can't produce a product that can accept a normal chassis ground like every other product out there then the product is junk, period. I among many others have done the research to claim that it's probably one of the most unreliable POS widebands out there. Doing what I do I have seen them all.

 

Something there tells me that if you wired it up, and it died, then you got it repaired, wired it the same way and died again, it probably was the way you wired it. They even tell you specifically in the instructions that wiring it to the frame is not optimal, and that if you have all the electronics mounted at one point and then a low resistance item mounted somewhere else (ie - our car has most items mounted to the block) that is creates a path of least resistance for high currents through the low current device. That is stated directly in their manual. I have all items grounded to the same point, as they instruct in the manual (minus the few small ground wires that are on the frame from factory), and the wideband runs FLAWLESSLY. It runs MUCH better than the way I had it wired before.

I'm sure the reason why you can't do a "normal seperate chassis ground" is because as they state, its a precision electronic. I'm sure they could have easily put a filter to help protect the DAC in it, but if they did, it would probably change the way the LC-1 reads its voltages and make it a little inaccurate.

Where did you have your power wire hooked up to and did you install an inline fuse?

 

This is pointless to argue with you. You have no idea why the devices have failed and are assuming a bad ground based on your one experience with it. My point in the beginning is that it wasn't a bad ground that caused mine to fail and it hasn't been that way for a lot of others either. They are so unreliable that people won't even sell them anymore and their message board is flooded with complaints and has been since they were released. Go ahead and blame it on bad wiring, it doesn't matter. I am glad it's been working well for you but I have seen it time and time again on customers cars in multiple shops. I am not going to go into my qualifications but electrical engineering and circuit design is nothing new to me and I understand how this **** works.

 

I'll leave it then. I'm sure you know much more about this than I do (and I'm being sincere) as you're right, i have only had one experience with it. I was just rather amazed that just changing the wiring and boom it finally worked right. I do have one fried sitting in storage that didn't make it, but the other works fine now. I'm sure my defending the LC-1 will come back to haunt me as others have said, but its already said and done, so I'll just throw up the white flag, and drink a with ya.

Cheers.

 

I don't own either of these devices, so I am a neutral party (no pun intended). However, I am an Electrical Engineer and I have studied the grounding issues. A chassis ground is not the same as an engine ground. At the very least the noise levels on each differ. This would most likely take an oscilloscope to verify, which I suspect no one in this discussion has done. IIRC, the Innovate instructions specify an engine ground. So if you do not do this, you are violating their instructions from the start. GIGO (garbage in, garbare out).
Best of luck to all involved.

 

The instructions recommend the engine for the best grounding scheme however stating at the same time they understand that might not be practical and give several other scenarios. Obviously different ground points will have different voltage offsets in the end which is what they are trying to avoid.

 

Have you tried calling them instead of just emailing?

I've had my LC-1 for years at this point, no issues, but I did take some extra time to make sure it was wired as per their instructions. Guess mine is just a freak unit compared to the millions of internet users that didn't have such good luck...oh wait. You only hear bad things on the 'net. Forgot about that.

 

These are called differences in potential, which I chose to avoid in my original post (I actually removed it to avoid confusion). In a perfect DC world, these would be mere voltage steps up or down. What is of more concern in a digital world is called noise, which could be simplistically viewed as oscillations in the voltage. Combine this noise with the voltage steps, and you can wreak havoc on a digital system.
As I previously stated, I don't own one. But I did work with a friend in hooking his up. It was flaky until he connected the ground to the engine (he went down the transmission tunnel to his transmission, which is the same point electrically as the engine). As soon as he did that, everything was just dandy.

 

We have a scope and we know how to use it (two different conditions that don't necessarily go hand in hand). We also do automotive design work. Ground loops are the top issue in aftermarket widebands in the installations we see (ground location A is not necessarily the same as ground location B). Secondarily noise from a ground near a noise source such as a high power PWM controlled circuit, electric water pump or ignition. You can fight the ground loops with isolation circuity which no one is willing to pay for or by intelligent routing to good grounds. Unfortunately few people have the time, knowledge and money to find a good ground for each installation. So we end up with threads all over the internet based on conjecture rather than solid testing and evaluation.

Blindly saying that the engine block is the best ground is not universally wise. It is altogether possible that the routing to that location will induce more noise than a local ground of high quality due to nearby ignition noise or many other potential sources. It is also possible that the difference in a chassis ground plane near the installation is 0.001v off from a engine ground further from the installation site thereby making the point moot. You just don't know until you actually do the work to check it. However, manufacturers have to say something in their installation manual and can't tell every customer to head out to their car with a scope. In the case of the LC-1, the packaging allows an installation in the engine bay and an engine based ground makes a lot of sense.

These issues aren't specific to the LC-1 and will affect any non-isolated wideband or automotive sensing device in general (dataloggers, ECUs, etc). No wideband (an automotive specific design) should fail due to a slightly noisy ground as any automotive board layout should have extensive protections against mis-wiring of the power, ground and inputs as well as extensive provisions for noise reduction. The automotive environment is noisy and any experienced automotive designer understands that and must design specifically for noise and user error.