The BS3, Accell and FAST all have dealer networks. Like your new car, you don't call GM when your Corvette does not start, you call your dealer. They all 3 have ways of getting direct help, this is secondary to what they want the customer to do and is just a added bonus. The need for buying your product from a dealer that can provide good service is up to you.
BS3 in my primary market which is gen3 V8's. Will also run traditional engines of other brands.
Direct plug and play with high quality sealed harness.(this assumes factory map sensor is being used, we change the plug here for 2/3 bar map on customer request)
Direct stand alone ability with individual cylinder control timing/fuel
Will not run factory dash.
Not watertight.
Will interface with "Racepak" dash to give live moniter of all function to driver w/o laptop.(OPTION)
Dual wideband (OPTION)
Full trans control, no additional boxes needed. Plug and play(OPTION)
Internal data logging w/o laptop. (OPTION)
These are just a few that we need for our customers.

Kurt

 

HP tuners has a nice product that has a ton of good features. They are working on 3bar map sensor that would be awsome for me personally.

Aftermarket needs come when you have cars like I have, they are not factory gen3 cars.


Kurt

 

lol, look at my sig.

91 convertibles arnt exactly gen III cars either... 55 chevys arnt... and 69 camaros arnt..

but the stock harness is ALMOST standalone... just add power to the right wires, and she fires right up.. only 5 plugs you even have to look at...

my point is, the factory stuff is basically free.. 99% of us have it already.. swap or stock, it usually comes with everything.. and 99-02s are wired almost identically.

if someone made a program like what im talking about, then you could flash any 99-02 fbody with it, and have all of the abilities of the aftermarket systems..

sure, if you wanted say, a two step feature, you might have to add a wire to ground a pin or something.... but its not hard... not harder then any MS install ive done.

just throwing in another wrench in the monkey works.. lol

 

Kurt, updated my post with your info, thanks. I may split the topic to make the comparo info easy to find.

MrDude, if it were that easy, nobody would have written LS1Edit/HPTuners/EFILive/TunerCat/TTS/etc. in the first place There's quite a lot going on in the box hardware-wise, that we don't have documentation for. Its just faster/easier/more bug resistant to start with hardware you know and/or designed and build an aftermarket EFI. Sure would be nice to be able to use the factory hardware though. Both HPTuners and EFILive have started down that road a bit, as they both offer customizations to the operating system. They've added things like 2/3 bar support, shift light outputs, etc.

There's really three camps as I see it when it comes to electronic engine management, and its not so much a personality conflict between groups or level of ability as it is an end-result or personal decision. For many solutions all of the mentioned solutions will work. Anyway, three camps:

1. DIY'ers - either find a way to "trick" the car into doing what they want, or building something themselves to achieve the end result.
2. Plug-and-play'ers - they want a more hands-off approach, don't want to learn much about the guts of what they're using. They just want to install it and have it work.
3. The gearheads - they'll dig into something only as much as a wrench will allow. If they need to learn wires, computers, etc. they'll have someone else do it

The MS falls pretty solidly into camp 1.
The BS3 falls a hair above camp 2.
The FAST is about half way between camp 1 and 2 (due to wiring, mainly).
HPT/EFI/LS1Edit/etc. fall between camp 2 and 3.
Taking the car to a shop is firmly camp 3

As my little plug, this website houses some of the most intelligent minds in the Gen-3 community. It houses some of the forerunners in Gen-3 advancement. There's no reason for anyone to say one solution is the best for all situations. Heck, there's no reason we can't take the MegaSquirt, fork the project, and turn it into "The LS1Tech Vehicle Management system" if we chose to do so. To me that's one large benefit of the MS, but to most everyone else it really doesn't mean anything since they're not going to sit down and learn how to program embedded devices. I think it would be a fun community effort to expand the MS in the Gen-3 world at a rate faster than the MS community-at-large will. It still would not be for everyone, just like the BS3/FAST/etc. isn't for everyone -- not everyone needs an aftermarket ECM in the first place.

 

Back to the original poster.... For the LT1 would you want to keep the factory gauges? In either the case of the BS3 or the FAST, you would splice it into the factory harness then. I believe Mac @ FastTrack sells a harness for the FAST, but I don't typically reccomend him since his customer service was pretty inconsistent the last time I dealt with him.

 

IF I'm a CTO ... This is where our culture now is, that the honesty of anyone who doesn't agree with our point of view is automatically suspect. For shame.

As it happens, I left my CTO position of six years in May, being able to afford to pursue another of my passions. As a CTO primarily concerned with the technology we supplied to large volumes of software customers, I was well aware of both the technological and ideological debates between open source and proprietary source companies. And my personal experiences there convinced me that the open source community was just as liable, if not more so, to hype and BS - although the marketing budgets were surely smaller

Look, I think MS is great. I took both internal combustion engine theory and control theory in engineering grad school, and I'd love the intellectual challenge presented by a DIY controller. But for me, I'd rather spend some extra money and save some time to work on other aspects of my car's track worthiness. If someone wants to build a true PnP solution for LS1s based on MS, then test it thoroughly and get a substantial community of ordinary, non-specialist users to testify to their positive experiences, I will surely use it for the inevitable next project

 

my choice is based on support. i probably wouldn't have tried the mega without scott here to help me. now that it is on the truck i know how simple they are to wire and tune. if the original poster has local help from someone that wants to run a fast set up then that would be a big selling point to me.

i just got a COMPLETE fast xfi set up. it is a very nice package. no idea how hard it is to install and tune but i give them credit for puting together a nice looking package.

i am still trying to figure out if it will directly fire the coils without some kind of crank trigger. i think it might. there are plugs that go right into the coil packs and a cam and crank sensor plug. there are also wires labeled points and points ground, no idea what those are for but they might be to goto a crank triger. i got this thing for FREE and was going to sell it but i might keep it and try it on my next project.

 

Nice.

I'd say before you install it, that you get support in place. I think I'd try to contact Dave Heminger (not sure on spelling) over there at FAST, he has installed the old style FAST's on the LS1 so I would think he knows how to get that XFI up and running fast. I just wonder if you would need to run an eDis box.

 

it came with an edis box, does that mean i need a crank trigger of some kind?

it will probably be 6 months at least before i am ready for a new project, i am thinking about a colorado with a boosted ls1.

 

Wouldn't running EDIS be a step backwards? I don't see how that makes any sense.

 

Brains, and Diesel geek

have you guys started work on making the MS fire the coils?

 

i dont know how it works. it has 2 plugs for the coil packs so it will run the stock coils. it would be nice if someone steped in here that knows how it works. if it doesn't run the coils without a seperate crank trigger then i probably will just sell it and go with the mega but if it will just plug in i might try it.

 

It should just plug in and play. The old box had a signal decoder that changed a 24x signal into a 4x, this is a step backwards from your factory system but gives you full control over function. I think they built the decoder into the new box. The old box/e-dist combo had missfire problems at higher power levels.
You should get in touch with Wormboy, I believe he is using the new e-dist.


Kurt

 

Hell Ill buy it from ya parish, or trade ya for a MS box with harness,

 

i looked up all of these parts, it is $2400 worth of stuff from http://www.azspeed.com/xfielfuinsy.html

drag week kicked ***. i got well over $3000 worth of free stuff, that week cost me less than $1000 and was the most fun ever. what a great deal.

 

So thats Uh a NO????




ed

 

Thats a great deal. It will probably get bigger next year with the mag coverage from this year.


Kurt

 

Yes, work has started and is coming along nicely I've got it prototyped and sitting on my desk at home, hooked up to the computer. I've got a little more code to write, and then some testing on the bench, then testing in the car. Its a simple unit though, I don't expect much problem with it working. All it has to do is read the LS1 crank and cam sensors, then accept a trigger input from the MS for timing. Dwell time is handled by my box, figured it was easier that way It reads the car's battery voltage to adjust dwell for a strong or weak coil voltage as well. I am ignoring the dwell commanded by the Megasquirt, because with a single spark output you would run out of dwell time at high RPM's -- the pulse widths need to overlap. In other words, you need to start charging the next coil in sequence BEFORE the current coil has even fired. That's the flaw with many EDIS systems, distributor ignitions, etc. -- you simply run out of time to charge the coil betweek firing events. Coil per cylinder solves that issue, since you can charge as many coils at once as necessary.

I wrote the code so it can easily be dropped into MS once the larger pin-count microcontroller is implemented, and then we won't need this module at all. If I get fancy, I might at some point in the future code it to read the rising edge of the crankshaft reluctor so it knows exactly where the engine is in the firing order in only 90 degrees of crankshaft rotation. All that really does is make the engine light off faster, and as-is it works like every other aftermarket EFI with sequential ignition -- it waits for a cam sensor transition to set the current step in the firing order (which takes up to one full crankshaft rotation).

 

Why do they call you Brains again???

Sounds great, so it looks like a semi plug and play MS is on the horizion for us LS1'ers? It would be nice to buy a complete package of everything we need to swap to ms from one source.

Keep us posted on your progress.
J

 

LOL. The "IF" was because of a typo. Spilled pop on my keyboard a long time ago, and the left shift key is sticky. I'm too lazy to replace it... see MANY of my other posts here that have the same typo - I wasn't doubting your credentials - I promise!

People here can't seem to understand that I don't care WHAT they run - I never said it's the way everyone should go, etc. It's just that I'm not too tolerant of misleading "points" that aren't relevant to an argument. Brains has it laid out perfectly as far as I am concerned...





-scott