1974 Fiat 128 Sedan for the Bride of Burrito.

Had a good night in the shop. I got things cleaned up and put away before starting in on the new task at hand.

I've had the entire FI harness unplugged multiple times now, so extracting it completely tool only a handful of minutes. Since we are starting from nearly scratch there's no point in labeling the connectors.

One of the pluses of being an electrician is my access to fun toys.

After a fair amount of chopping, I had a nice pile of spare wire.

And an even nicer pile of labeled connectors ready for the real work tomorrow.

I know it's nonsensical labeling both ends of a wire when it is a non polar device, but I'll do things my way and you can do things your way.

Also, not pictured is the relay cable ran through the firewall in the factory location. I will need to decide on final mounting position before moving too far ahead with the harness.

I still need to look into how I configured the board, but that's what breaks are for tomorrow.

That labeling makes the MOST sense to people with the correct neural configuration.

How do you make and apply your wire labels?

pres589 wrote: How do you make and apply your wire labels?

They come out of a handheld Brady label maker. IdXpert or something like that. The labels themselves are a peel and stick "self-laminating" type and work awesome in hot and oily environments, so long as the wire is clean when you apply it.

I also like the heatshrink type, but I've found the self laminating ones look a little more professional.

Damn...I'm too late or I coulda told you to leave the factory harness right where it was and buy a microsquirt. It maps to the factory harness pin for pin.

In reply to JThw8:

Honestly, even if I had had that information yesterday, I would still be doing it like the way I am. The harness should be done tonight and the rest of the stuff is already paid for.

Since this is currently a fuel-only install, do I want to just use the negative terminal on the coil as my tach input, or should I use the factory VR sensor and trigger wheel for future expandability and convenience. I figure at some point I will be controlling spark, but as it is now it seems like it is just adds one more device to possibly fail.

Last night I got the injector, CTS, IAT, and TPS harness "done". I need to pick up a few rolls of friction tape to wrap it in, but that will wait until it makes some explosions happen.

We also decided on the final mounting point for the relay board and knocked out a quick CADboard template.

So that'll get punched out of some 16ga today.

Oh, I changed the tach signal configuration on the main board for a VR sensor instead of the optoisolator or whatever. That should make spark control that much easier down the road.

Still pecking away at this MS nonsense. The relay board bracket came out nice and fit right in with no modifications. I'll powder coat it at some point in the future, but it's going in raw for now.

The relay board nestles up against the HVAC box underneath the cowl.

The harness itself is about 90% terminated at this point. I still need to wire in the wideband controller, VR sensor, a switched 12v source, an engine ground, fuel pump, and a 12v constant source. So, maybe it's more like 75%, but the engine half of the harness is largely comlete.

The fuel pump and switched 12v source have been liberated from the fuse block and just need to be brought over.

Maybe explosions tomorrow. I'm excited to start the software half of the install. I'll certainly be springing for the registered version of TunerStudio for the auto tune feature.

That relay board install looks fantastic. Looking forward to seeing your wire routing technique, especially leaving the relay board, as that's the aspect of my previous 2002 install that looked most disgusting (there was some competition for that title).

Ransom wrote: That relay board install looks fantastic. Looking forward to seeing your wire routing technique, especially leaving the relay board, as that's the aspect of my previous 2002 install that looked most disgusting (there was some competition for that title).

I would like to say that I have a totally awesome plan for strain relief and routing, but I'm still waiting for that great idea to hit me. I did definitely forget to attach a photo in that post, though. This is as things sit now.

I might make another small bracket to hold a cord grip and pass the whole loom though it.

We will see. I'm sure something will come to me.

Become a MS expert so I can call on somebody local when I install it in the midlana.

Burrito wrote: Maybe explosions tomorrow. I'm excited to start the software half of the install. I'll certainly be springing for the registered version of TunerStudio for the auto tune feature.

I'm pretty sure T-Pain would approve...or sue

I've been quietly following this build. Love it Such a rad little car.

Will the screw-down connections on that terminal strip be solid enough under bumps, vibration etc? Could you solder straight to the board instead?

Might not need to make a bracket just to hold the loom (push-clip zipties are good enough for a lotta OEMs), but a quick disconnect would be neat.

Good luck, weird crypto-Soviet car. You can do it.

Ok I know zero about megasquirt, so this may be a dumb question. Won't you need to have a cover/box over that circuit board to protect it from fluids/dirt/grime etc. if it's going to live in the engine bay?

Just curious.

Gentlemen, we have ignition!

Wut.

Where is video proof?

Does this mean you're coming to the NW meet on Saturday? Sounds like it's ready to make the trip.

In reply to Mezzanine:

No video proof, my phone died unusually early in the night. Probably has something to do with reading about tunerstudio all day on it. It sounds like a Yugo/Strada/X19 idling with nothing behind the catalytic converter. Maybe I will shoot a little video tonight for you fellers.

The car actually started on the second attempt, which is absolutely amazing. It probably would have started on the first attempt, but some beer soaked yahoo left the car in gear.

I was just going to stuff the O2 sensor in the factory location, but the manual that came with the wideband controller stressed how important it was to mount the senor 18-24" downstream for the port. Just before the cat seemed like the best place, especially since it didn't require disassembling anything.

You totally want to leave an open bucket of used oil right by where you are welding. There's no possibly way that could end poorly. You should probably keep some old gas in there, just to be sure.

The MS install still has a LOT of finish work to be done, but it is largely complete.

Awesome job - starting on the first/second try with a brand new EMS is no small accomplishment!

Can't wait to see it tomorrow.

It was a short, busy weekend for me, but I did manage to get a few hours in at the shop Sunday evening. The car starts up great and idles well when cold, but the idle starts to hunt as it warms up. At this point I have it starting reliably, so I can start to work on my after start enrichment, WUE figures and the idle portion of my VE Table (I guess, I'm really just making things up and regurgitating what I read on the internet). Oh, I also need to double check ignition timing now that it runs.

Before I do that, I need to tie in a few relays to supply clean power to the wideband controller and ignition module; they are both being fed off of the same switched 12v circuit as the MS, which I assume is a big no-no. It was basically done in an attempt to speed things up to see the light at the end of the silly Yugoslavian tunnel. It worked, but now it's time to fix it.

So, here's where we are at now. You can see there's some temporary wiring outside of the main engine loom, all of that will get tied up and wrapped like everything else once it's known to be right.

The car did move under it's own power last night for the first time, so that is a huge milestone for me. Hopefully I am getting close to a halfway reliable car worthy of my daily commute. I would also really like to take the car south for Thanksgiving, but that is probably pushing it a bit.

I only barely understand MS. Most of it has yet to be translated into something that I can wrap my head around. The most I understand is some of the fueling, basically enough to keep the thing from blowing up.

In reply to Harvey:

That's pretty close to what I know. I also know that I am very glad I went fuel only to start. I can't imagine trying to get fuel and spark baselines set at the same time with my amount of knowledge.

I'm trying very hard to do this on my own without too much help from outside influences. I'd rather learn from doing and make a few mistakes so I actually know the program and what the engine requires instead of plugging numbers in because the Internets told me too.

At least for now, that is. It's absolutely likely that I toss my hands up in defeat and start a "help me tune my MS" thread in a week.

Have you ever considered doing some of the online tuning classes like those offered by High Performance Academy? They do a hell of a job making the tuning process make a lot more sense and provide you with a process to go through in setting up all your maps.

Regarding your idle issue, a rule of thumb for setting up the maps is that when running closed loop, any trims over 5-10% indicate that your base map still needs work. Do the VE table before you spend much time on enrichment tables.

Adding spark is no big deal - you just get it close to start with and focus on getting your fuel map dialed in first. Set minimum timing for max torque after everything else is working well.

I'm pretty excited about vicariously learning to tune MegaSquirt through this thread.

There's a lot of documentation but it also seems pretty unfocused, which is about what I would expect to have produced for documentation if I were to build a MegaSquirt-like. I'm busy reading the Cramer/Hoffman book at the moment but I keep getting called away by things that don't require quite so much mental focus, like my day job.

Congrats on the runner.

In reply to Mezzanine:

I honestly didn't know that such a thing existed. Now that you've mentioned it, it seems absolutely ridiculous that there wouldn't be multiple performance tuning classes, but the thought had honestly not crossed my mind.

In reply to ssswitch:

I too am hoping to learn Megasquirt vicariously through this thread.

The car is running MUCH better after last night's efforts. It turns out I had missed a step when setting up the wideband. It was giving me a reading of about 12:1 at idle and it has hunting excessively, after I went through the "Calibrate AFR Table" it leaned out to over 15:1. After I fattened it up a bunch it smoothed right out. So, programmable EFI is really, really cool, but why do I have to tell it what O2 sensor I'm using in 3 (!) different places.

In other news, berkeley the Yugo. Seriously. I'm parting it out. Like, starting tonight it's coming apart. Expect a part out thread and some real 128 content in this thread over the next few days.