Fred's FreeEMS themed GRMC 2017 + QA

Hello all!

Firstly, I had a great time at the event, getting to the event, and getting home from the event! All Miata (MX5!) powered! All FreeEMS powered, too :-D

Secondly, huge thanks for Rob and Steve for hosting me, making me feel not just welcome, but also part of the team. Hugely appreciated! XXOO

Thirdly, thanks to all of the GRM staffers and volunteers and honorary contributors who made the event what it was. Good job, all!

Fourthly, it was great to meet everyone that I managed to have a decent talk with! Some pretty cool people! Keep in touch :-)

I took around 600 photos and videos over the two days and two batteries (with mains lead of charger left in Atlanta because I didn't think I'd need it) and will upload what I feel is relevant and in focus as soon as I get a chance. Some of the shots are really good, others not so much. For example, during the "town meeting" I was snapping what I could of people's faces/expressions with my zoom lense from the left rear :-) F-stop isn't great on it, so y'all had to keep still! And few did :-D Nevertheless, some came out pretty nice (IMO), so I'll share them here when I get a chance. In the mean time, my twitter account has the low-quality stuff that I took with my spare phone (scratched/dirty lense/camera), if interested. Specific (for reference) links below, generic link here: https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/ (in a week or so it'll be back to random car pictures from my fleet and other random life junk like kiwi scenery and politics, click at your own risk, below is safe)

Road trip down:

• https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/920907942320328704
• https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/920909004540346368
• https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921019292749049856

Challenge prep in Tampa:

•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921186119940820992
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921188519766347777
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921188947124019200
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921189545680556032
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921189684709031936
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921197482167689216
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921197631635894272
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921197797835264000
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921198726668005376
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921199077219618816
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921206422465142784
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921208972039868416
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921215166259367936
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921215429367930880
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921226593485275138

Challenge in Gainesville:

•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921226616344215553
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921606718668398598
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921606999606951936
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921610331880873984
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/921610635779231744
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/922214793330688001
•     https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/922215215424589824

Total trip mileage: https://twitter.com/FredCookeNZ/status/922216166814289921

Selected photos from the above (for reference) links, inlined for your pleasure:

^ 295/25 tyres on 28 inch rims, LOL :-p

And last, but my no means least, quite a few people were interested in talking FreeEMS and how it could be applied to a GRM challenge car to gain control and other benefits without pushing the budget out. Hence QA at the end of the thread title. I'll try to summari(s|z)e below, but ask me anything you like, at worst I'll refuse to comment :-)

Why would you want/not want FreeEMS on your challenge car? Use this simple guide:

•  If your engine is unmodified and the (free/very cheap) OEM ECU is well-understood and can be easily/quickly/cheaply made to function correctly, use it. Counter example, Maxima V6 in Mini, though he might have bigger oil pressure issues.
•  If you want boost/cams/ITBs/NOS and need a degree of control, and your OEM ECU cannot be modified/adapted/tuned with free/easy solutions, then you need a standalone ECU of some sort.
•  If you need a standalone ECU and your whole car has a budget of US $2000 then your choice of standalones is significantly narrowed! Even M$ systems cost around $400 US (ms1 375 and not worth using, ms2 445, near a third of your budget)
•  So being able to control your engine for in the 50 to 300 USD range (IF you need it) really frees up your budget for other more important stuff like turbos and turbos and tyres (unless you're too tired).
•  There are at least two ways to get the dollars low:
• 1) Buy your MS2 box second hand from craigslist or a forum seller, check it over, fix it/mod it if required, and use it.
• 2) Use FreeEMS and do something between ultra-ghetto/cheap (highest time cost, lowest $ cost) and out of the box ready as Rob/Steve did (highest $ cost, lowest time cost, but still significant time, as with any from-scratch standalone install).
•  Which ever standalone (or transplanted OEM ECU!) you go with, it'll require a significant investment in time from all involved to understand it, configure it, set it up on the car, setup a laptop for it, tune it, and tweak it as needed. You need to factor this into your decision process. Counter example, I installed EFI on my SOHC 4G63 on a Friday night (fuel pump, filter, inlet manifold, throttlebody, etc), and drove it (my only car at the time) to work with a rough tune on Monday morning. By the following Friday it was running pretty well. But I know my stuff, and the car already had FreeEMS with ignition only control :-)

As for FreeEMS, there is good, bad, ugly, and indifferent. As with anything, it's not perfect. It can run most older to say early 2k engines just fine. If you're brave it can even do drive-by-wire. It's run a CBR600RR engine to 12500 RPM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGxxafir7n0 & https://vimeo.com/81936852), and a turbo Neon engine to 20 something PSI of boost, an LT1 turbo, an RB25DET (stock CAS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e088b5cvF_Y&t=58s), a 1UZFE on a stand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=961alKym_B8), a 5 cylinder Volvo, a small-port 4age with ITBs to 7500 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kb0z5UHnS8), and a slew of ordinary 4 cylinders in various setups. Including Rob's street-Miata as seen around the carpark at the event and hotel. His car packs the "big block mazda" 2 litre four cylinder FE-DOHC engine, with a T3 china turbo and did 1200km odd to and from the event with a starting point of Atlanta GA. He even let me put some miles on it around Gainesville and on the way there (~3 hours) and the way back (~2 hours). Stoked! I get a huge kick out of videos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5eNhSxHWKs So hook me up! :-D More info on Rob's Miata here: http://forum.diyefi.org/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=2572

FreeEMS is far from perfect, despite how well that Miata-truck BP engine ran on the weekend. Too many flaws to list, but the reality is that most of them aren't "blockers" (they don't stop you achieving good results). I guess the main negatives right now in the context of 2017 and easily available engines are:

1) RPM/safety limitations on 60-2 (BMW, Volvo, etc) and to a lesser extent 36-1 (Ford), lower tooth counts (24 crank and down) can rev as high as you need. I've personally revved a Volvo modular 6 pot in a 960 sedan to over 7000 with 60-2, but I can't hand on heart tell you it's a good idea.

2) No variable VVT support, yet. It's not difficult to implement, it's just that none of my 13.5 cars and 30 or 40 personal engines have VVT on them. A few have on/off VVT, which is trivial to do with existing generic functionality, but nothing with PWM style PID position control, so far. Buy me an engine-on-stand setup with this feature, and I'll get it done for you :-)

Another issue (from a FOSS purist perspective) is that some of the better (IMO) PC software is not free (as in speech) however I do let good people use it for free (as in beer) for the time being (unlikely to change before 2018 challenge). The tuning software is pretty bad, but works well enough since a different kiwi-Rob and I put in some time just before the last challenge to make it usable for Rob and Steve on tetanus.

If you are considering using it, on a challenge car, or otherwise, then please don't try to go it alone. Instead, it's MUCH better to work with the regulars closely to expedite your route to success.

Cheers, Fred.

I'm glad FreeEMS was mentioned during the broadcasts- that sounds really interesting.

I'll have to check them out at home- for some reason they are being blocked here at work.  Which is incredibly ironic.

I also need to learn more about this. Fred, it was great to meet you and we are grateful you came over to help with the Saab ute.

Probably blocked due to lack of SSL. I need to pull finger on that... Sorry!

Robbie, and anyone else I met, I'll need a photo reminder of who you were. There were 3 Saab centric chaps over there. I came over because David Wallens requested that I did so. I'd have been more than happy to help, but half the reason I started FreeEMS was that OEM ECUs are mostly opaque and I dislike them for that reason. Plus the fuel filter was preventing any kind of further attempts :-D

Speaking of which, that's one thing that Rob/Steve didn't/couldn't leverage: default rich 80 sample per second datalogs with full meta data embedded. You can do things like watch compression cycles during cranking with the default setup, and you can also up the baud and fine tune the content to get up to about 1kHz out of it, or anywhere in between depending on baud and content. Or slower with even more stuff, if you need it. Quality datalogs are HUGELY valuable for analysing not just engine behaviour, but also driver and/or vehicle behaviour, and even feature behaviour during dev and/or test.

Another option if you're a nerd is to hack on it, that FSAE car with the CBR600RR had full pneumatic paddle shift, flat shift, 2-step, etc, all through the FreeEMS box, which only took about 100 lines of additional code by the Swedes on top of the base. Pretty valuable if you have a larger team with plenty of clever people like the winning Georgia Tech team.

In reply to FreeEMSFred :

You guys need to practice safe interenting, according to CyberSteve.

Free ems on a 1uzfe you say? More details please?

Looks like there are two pages- http://www.diyefi.org/  and http://freeems.org/

What I don't see in either of those is how to build the computer....  Any insight to that would be interesting.  

Yes, glad Fred made the big trip. Hard to believe that it's been eight years since he last visited--and slept on my living room floor. I'm assuming that we'll see Fred in Gainesville next year. :)

In reply to David S. Wallens :

We're hoping he'll come back too, but alas -- his travel bill will probably be a $2018 Challenge in its own right!

Want to keep this thread up, as I'm fascinated by the FreeEMS system.  I want to find more details.

In reply to alfadriver :

Enlighten me: What is 'interenting'?

FreeEMS is the software/firmware that runs on the hardware you buy/build. There's a hardware section on the DIYEFI forum specific to FreeEMS, but I'm sure Fred will revisit this thread. He's on his way to CA now, then back home to NZ.

m1sandman said:

In reply to alfadriver :

Enlighten me: What is 'interenting'?

Anything that is really low cost, and has some decent controllability is interesting to me.

It would also be interesting to see plans for additions.  VCT has been noted that it's there, but not quite supported.  What I'm interested in is WB O2 sensor direct support.  I've seen some DIY plans for UEGO circuitry, which should be capable of integrating into anyone's system.  

I watched the RussEFI system for a while- it kind of got sidetracked.

For this one, I should take a look at the calibration guides and the code.  See how the air charge is calculated- they go from a engine speed-map to pulse width table to fully calculating the amount of air going into the cylinder and matching that with a calcualted fuel flow.  And everything in between.

I've always thought it would be intersting to convert the gold car you see in my avatar to EFI.  And cost is a big deal.

FE3tMX5 said:

FreeEMS is the software/firmware that runs on the hardware you buy/build. There's a hardware section on the DIYEFI forum specific to FreeEMS, but I'm sure Fred will revisit this thread. He's on his way to CA now, then back home to NZ.

The starting part that I could not find in the two web sites I found- how to build the computer.  I found the step one part- figure out exactly what you need and want.  

The other thing that I want to point out to all of the open source people- the amount of information in SAE papers that you can use for the code.  There's a lot of rich information in published papers.  

In reply to alfadriver :

Ah, I understand now. I was taking the spelling literally :D

Oops.  Not sure how I missed that.

So I found a couple of forums about building and selling.  But the most recent kit was from Feb '17.  It's the RussEFI that's been talked about here, too.  All of the rest are at least 2 years old.  

Is that "Frankenstein" kit the one used for this car?

Or is there any way you can talk about building and calibrating this system?

Thanks for starting the thread Fred. We talked at the pool Saturday night.  Our gang of misfits have already been discussing FreeEMS since then. We'll be in touch. 

The CoolEFI Jaguar A7 is in the Challenge truck Miata. We are going to move to the CoolEFI Basic ecu to recover some budget dollars over the A7 we use now. 

http://coolefi.com/products/content/6-ecu-comparison

Since this is opensource- it's entirely possible there is somebody on this forum that has the skill/ability to design and build a board to run FreeEMS. Bueller? Bueller? One of the early adopters built his hardware on a bread board and inside a food storage container.

I used the FreeEMS IRC user channel and email (CoolEFI) for questions/support on my builds. What you will not find is a step-by-step build guide. Primarily because so few cars have run FreeEMS and there have been a variety of different hardware assemblies to run it. I think it's like a lot of things you see on this forum- it requires patience, education (as in reading, honesty and asking for help) and the ability to resist quitting against all odds. 

Was just going to post the CoolEFI URL but Rob beat me to it.  Wish I would've been paying attention more at the Challenge and would've investigated more builds rolling around.

Posting anyway for the bump. 

http://coolefi.com/products/ecu/15-coolefi-basic-ecu.html

In reply to alfadriver :

I'm running rusEfi in my Volvo wagon, but that's a story for a different thread. 

Trackmouse said:

Free ems on a 1uzfe you say? More details please?

Sorry for the delay! The video has most of the details in still frames at the start and in the middle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=961alKym_B8

Bone stock 1UZ-FE with a flex plate and a super dodgy DIY hardware arrangement (the long board visible in the photos).

No cooling hooked up, hence water spouts in videos. The torque to inertia ratio meant that the trigger style used wasn't appropriate, so protection had to be turned off to not false trigger on fairly extreme rotational acceleration. Hence the "accidental antilag" visible for some time as it got out of sync with the engine, or vice versa. It's suprising that it ran as well as it did because the high current ignition wires ran right over the crank pickup wires! :-D

I apologise in advance for my excited squeals/screaming. In this video, and others, too. It's just how I roll :-)

David S. Wallens said:

Yes, glad Fred made the big trip. Hard to believe that it's been eight years since he last visited--and slept on my living room floor. I'm assuming that we'll see Fred in Gainesville next year. :)

Thanks David! I'm glad and I'm glad you're glad, too. Cue a cream song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3GIQ86eu6c

Way back then FreeEMS had only been running an engine (my sweet Volvo 740 wagon) for a couple of days. Tuned in Tampa Bay, and en route,  by FE3tMX5 on some really bad software that got fixed in Wellington NZ as I drove through Naples heading north from Key West to m1sandman's place. Here's an old clip of that very first firmware version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q4XatBmviM

And this is me christening it in FE3tMX5's driveway in Atlanta while it idled just before being decommissioned and me flying home to NZ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbmQDKL03Q

The firmware has come a LONG way in that time, as have other tools around it. There's still plenty to do, though. :-)

FE3tMX5 said:

FreeEMS is the software/firmware that runs on the hardware you buy/build. There's a hardware section on the DIYEFI forum specific to FreeEMS, but I'm sure Fred will revisit this thread. He's on his way to CA now, then back home to NZ.

This, this! All of this. Clearly I made it back to NZ, and with enough Volvo engine parts to build 1000hp*. :-D

FreeEMS is not a specific piece of hardware so there can never be a specific instruction on how to build a "FreeEMS". And I apologise again for the abysmal websites. Really. :-)

*: Across two engines, ~300hp and ~700hp :-)

alfadriver said:

What I'm interested in is WB O2 sensor direct support.  I've seen some DIY plans for UEGO circuitry, which should be capable of integrating into anyone's system. 

For this one, I should take a look at the calibration guides and the code.  See how the air charge is calculated- they go from a engine speed-map to pulse width table to fully calculating the amount of air going into the cylinder and matching that with a calcualted fuel flow.  And everything in between.

I'm personally not a fan of including wideband controller(s) into an engine controller design for a few reasons:

1. Separation of concerns, why build in obsolesence by way of a controller that supports X sensor if you may want to change in future, eg to LSU4.9
2. Electrical noise. Heater elements are high current and necessarily PWM switched which generates noise. It can be minimised, but not eliminated.
3. Bulk/heat/displacement of other features. Real estate is at a premium inside an ECU, it feels to me like a bad waste to put widebands in there, too.

FreeEMS uses a physical model with everything split out. Everything is calculated from SI units internally and as a result the math makes sense (at least to someone with university physics papers under their belt!) :-) This was one of my motivators, the "ReqFuel" concept (as used by more than one competing project) is just too weak and primitive and breaks parameterisation in many ways.

FreeEMSFred said:

FE3tMX5 said:

FreeEMS is the software/firmware that runs on the hardware you buy/build. There's a hardware section on the DIYEFI forum specific to FreeEMS, but I'm sure Fred will revisit this thread. He's on his way to CA now, then back home to NZ.

This, this! All of this. Clearly I made it back to NZ, and with enough Volvo engine parts to build 1000hp*. :-D

FreeEMS is not a specific piece of hardware so there can never be a specific instruction on how to build a "FreeEMS". And I apologise again for the abysmal websites. Really. :-)

*: Across two engines, ~300hp and ~700hp :-)

Here's the thing- there's no real indicator of what it will run on.  And since there are many gear heads who are not computer engineers, the building of the computer is a pretty big deal.  If there's a list of computers it will already run on, awesome.  

Hard to use and play with a system when the hardware is that much on the user's shoulders.