igotnothin

I didnt do the soldering but when i got it i thought i shold have.. lol it looks super easy, and could have saved a couple bucks doing it my self..

Tom-Guy

Alan kicked me one of these a couple years ago. Uhm, I used it for maybe five minutes? I feel bad not being able to offer more input. I keep meaning to perma-install it in my beater since it reads higher than 20:1 AFR, and I'm intrested in a lean burn closed loop system.

I CAN tell you that 90% of the bitchy-moany complaints in his support forum is a result of using a poor quality, or long, serial cable. I have a pair of high quality 3 foot cables that work flawlessly where generic eBay ones would not (Radio Shack are quality, BTW, surprised me too), but the 9 foot $$$quality$$$ one for BRMS' plotter wouldn't work. Maybe there is something that can be tweaked under port settings that would help this, as old serial cables were pretty ghetto and the longer cables (6 foot seems most common) have a lot of propigation delay by modern standards.

I was able to flash the firmware, and recalibrate lambda-voltage tables multiple times BUT I still had problems logging via the serial cable. If I disconnected or glitched something while logging it wouldn't reconnect until I reboosted laptop/wideband. I also had some occaisional glitches/errors 2-5 minutes into logging but that coupld have been port settings, etc.

FYI, I was using a Thinkpad T20 with an onboard serial port. Theo-rectally this is superior to a USB-serial cable, but with how XP has been since SP2+ my USB-serial cable problems are practically nonexistant and I have ZERO "X brand USB-serial cable won't work on Y EMS/hardware" problems, aside from some synch problems with some oddball setups. Given the higher transfer speed of USB it might take care of my *speculation* about signal propigation being the problem I had.


For any Honduh guy trying to log via ECU, or someone looking for an inexpensive unit to log across their ECU/EMS, the unit is a good budget buy. So you spend 15-30 minutes of frustration fiddling with unfamiliar port settings and there is a hidden $10-12 charge for a good quality serial cable, in the big picture of automotive performance you wish things were always that easy.

MAJORAHOLE

i soldered mine myself. it wasnt bad at all. easier than an ecu, or xbox fo show.
i used an ebay usb adapter cable, an never had a problem with connecting and updating the firmare, but like i said i never logged through it.
i think it would be better to just use freelog, or one of the other free loggers out there

fuse

Nice Ok. I may just use them as a good cheap display. Ya the logging doesn’t look that nice. But it dose have 2 outputs I think so you could just log threw the ecu like most other widebands.

Radio shack serial cable are good? Wow I have been avoiding them good to know thanks.

Tom-Guy

I just hopped on the Radio Slack site. What they used to have is a Gigaware (IIRC that's a RS house brand) cable that looks like this:



Older cables were white, but looked otherwise identical and were electronically identical.

What RS now claims to have is a Cables-to-Go Port Authority cable:



This cable looks similar to an ATEN cable (you can read ATEN on one of the chips in the semi-clear connector housing) which i have used with success on one car with an AEM EMS. As such, I would give it a try if you can't find the Gigaware unit BUT buyer beware.

fuse

Ya I am running a keyspan rite now with hit and miss success. I will try to get a hold of something better one day. Or find a laptop with a db9.

undesiredshoe

Ive been using one for about a year and its been working great. Look for usb-serial cables with the prolific chip since the cables i have use those and they work fine. Prolific chipped cables dont work with vista since there is no driver for vista right now....but vista sucks anyway.

blowngsr1wn

ran mine for over a year, worked great the only problem i had was a voltage offset that was cured when i updated to the newest firmware. i have recently sold it for the lc-1 so i can log it with ectune i like the fact that i can log straight from the serial feed from the lc-1. my jaw was perm installed with the volt out going to the D14 o2 input. worked like a champ.
sold it for about what i had in it
Wes

HiProfile

I've been looking into this as a perm install in my turbo cars, more as a watchdog & gas saver, than a perfectly accurate peice. I use my LC-1 for tuning, I rigged it into a project box with all sorts of switches and inputs/outputs for various situations.

Anyways I realized that since it has an EGT amp and I have an SSI-4 (and ectune with an analog input), I could save $50 on an external EGT amp to get a usable 0-5 volt signal.

Its also very cheap, and you can make 4 displays for under $25 (if you can wire & solder).




BTW wtf is with the word string *O*K* Seems this whole board keeps changing it to upcased "KO", anyone else read the words below w/o that happening?

look
poke
gook
nooka