Subaru ECU Learning

I've researching how the Subaru ECU in my WRX reacts to operating conditions to help me interpret the logs I've been getting from my Delta Dash. I found this thread "knock sensor activity in Deltadash?" at NASIOC which has some good information in it posted by Shiv from Vishnu Performance. I'll quote what I found important here:

The code at our disposal allows us to change the rate of retard, rate of advance, operational load range, operational rpm range, learning authority range, etc...

(The ECU) will pull back timing and store the knock correction levels in memory. If it does this in enough places in the table, the advance multiplier will drop and stay dropped until its sees consistent maxed-out positive knock correction.

The knock control system is active from ~2000rpm to ~6000RPM, give or take a few 100rpm based upon application/mapping. It's also active above moderate load (under boost). It is very unusual to hear audible ping within those conditions with deltadash consistently showing no drop-outs in knock correction.

BTW, if you try filling up a stock car with 87 octane, it will ping instantly, pull back timing, send the ignition advance multiplier well below 4 which will make the car run on its rich fuel map. For the most part, it will run ping-free. But every now and then, it will try to advance back to normal. And in doing so, it may ping audibly.

FWIW, I never look at the knock signal display. I only concentrate on knock correction as it's never let me down. Not only does it tell me when the car is starting to detonate, its behavior also gives insight to how severe or minor it is.

Recently I switched from the Cobb Stage 1 map back to the stock map. After a reset and a drive to work, the IAM advanced itself to 16. However, after driving a week, it's now down to 12 indicating that the ECU has detected enough knock that it decided to lower the maximum amount of timing it is willing to run. The trick now is to try and figure out why my engine is encountering detonation. Is it the poor quality gas we get here in CA? Is it something else in my engine (spark plugs, fuel filter, air filter, excessive blowby, or ???)? Until I figure this out, running a more aggressive map such as the Cobb Stage 1 will only lead to more frequent detonation and the increased possibility of engine damage.

Quote of the Day

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official. The president is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else."

--Theodore Roosevelt

WRX Delta Dash Logging

I recently picked up an EcuTek Delta Dash so that I could start diagnosing the audible ping I have been getting under full boost with my Cobb AccessPort Stage 1. I've been uploading all the plots and logs along with comments about each one. I have also started a thread about the logs/plots at both NASIOC and Cobb's WRX Forum.

So far, all I have been able to determine is that my engine is not happy running the CA Stage 1 maps. Audible ping and an IAM of 8-9 == Unhappy ECU. EcuTek has a lot of information about how the Subaru ECU adjusts for operating conditions, if you're curious you'll find it very interesting.

Hmm, I'm only half asian, but I bet that this book could have helped me out!

Wendy and I am driving up to the Bay Area in my company's big F-150 truck. I get to drop the truck off in San Franciso for the managing director, and a little vacation on the side. It will be good to see the parents and siblings again, I haven't seen them in a few months.

Quick Update

Haven't written much in a while, but not too much new stuff going on.

My buddy Tristan left for China a month ago to teach English. I even convinced him to start a blog and write about it. I hope he continues to write in it! He also has his own photo gallery. Not sure how much bandwidth he's got over there, though, so we'll see how much he is able to upload.

Going up to the Bay Area this weekend to visit family and friends. Will be nice to take a long weekend off from work, but there is soo many different things going on right now...

New Shower Door

Had a productive weekend, and installed a new shower door in the bathroom. It looks so much better!



This is what it looked like before:



There is a few more pics of higher quality if you click on the images.

Roller Weblogger

After setting up Roller for Megan to use, I did find that one aspect of managing the look/feel of your blog is a bit confusing. Not to mention that Megan got an ugly stack strace after trying to post her first blog entry.

Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
        at org.roller.presentation.weblog.formbeans.WeblogEntryFormEx.setPubTimeFormatted(WeblogEntryFormEx.java:95)

Anyway, it seems that I am not the first to write about these issues and the authors are working on fixing them. I should sign up to the development mailing list and look for ways to help, but I'm already subscribed to a gazillion other mailing lists...

StonGard

I ordered a StonGard (pronounced Stone Guard) light kit for my WRX a few weeks back from RockBlocker. It's pretty amazing that after a year and a half and 31k miles of driving the car, how many small rock chips are in the fog and head lights as well as the front bumper. The StonGard is thick, flexible 3M plastic material which you apply over the area you are protecting. I figure if it keeps my head and fog lights from getting chipped they will pay for themself. I installed one fog light this morning. Some people recommend using a liquid solution when installing, but I found that it just made it tough to get the material to stick. I had to get the heatgun out to help evaporate the liquid which sped up the process. I will try the other fog light without any liquid as the guys at RockBlocker recommend. Now I have to decide whether or not to get some paint protection as well, my bumper is getting pretty dinged up and I wouldn't want it to get too much worse.

Hi Megan!

Megan came down and visited Wendy and me last weekend while down here for her sister's bachelorette/bachelor party. She mentioned that she was interested in setting up a Blog of her own, so now she's got one!

PS - She turns 27 tomorrow!

Seasonic Super Tornado

I picked up a Seasonic Super Tornado PSU after reading this review over at Silent PC Review. Seasonic claims that is is one of the most efficient PSUs on the market which Silent PC Review confirmed. It is also very quiet.

To confirm the efficiency claims, I used my handy Kill-A-Watt meter to measure the current draw of my main desktop PC PC at idle and full load using mprime. My old PSU was an Antec True 430 which sells for $65 over at NewEgg. The Kill-A-Watt reported a power factor of 0.65 at idle and load, and 107W at idle and 124W under load. After swapping out the True 430 for the Super Tornado 300, the power factor measured 0.99 and now only pulled 91W at idle and 107W under load for a power draw reduction of 15%. Having a near perfect power factor will also reduce the current draw through the house wires as well, in this case the current draw will be cut in half. As Silent PC Review also noted, I found the Super Tornado to be very quiet, I can't hear it over the CPU fan or hard drives in my machine.

I've now ordered two more Super Tornado 300s from Computer Gate at $65/ea to replace the PSUs in my Linux firewall/fileserver PC and my MythTV PC. Computer Gate has free shipping on those PSUs right now. I'll take before and after measurements of both when they get here.

I highly recommend this PSU as it's price is comparable to all other high quality PSUs on the market and has the advantage of being the most efficient and also being extremely quiet.

Selling Some Stuff on eBay

Check it out:

• 1 128MB & 1 16MB SmartMedia Flash Memory AND USB Reader
  
• Maha/Powerex MH-C204F AA/AAA NiCD/NiMH Battery Charger
  

PETCO Park

I visited PETCO Park for my first time since it's grand opening a few weeks ago. It's a great facility located in the heart of San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter and right across the street from the San Diego Convention Center.

What made the trip even better, was that the Padre's beat the Expos 3-2 in the bottom of the 9th!

If you're in the area and have the chance to watch a game, I highly recommend going. If you can, get seats on the bottom floor of left field, they have a great view of the entire field. While you're there, treat yourself to one of the many restaurants within walking distance a few blocks away!

BackupPC

I found some great open source backup software the other day called BackupPC. I encourage you to check it out if you want an easy way to setup automatic incremental backups, it's really a great piece of software.

MSIE Broken Again

Well, Microsoft has managed to break MSIE again.

It turns out that KB832894 breaks the behavior of KeepAlive when under SSL. If you let your KeepAlive session then attempt to submit a form, the browser will not actually post any request parameters to your action.

One fix is to disable KeepAlive for MSIE clients. Unfortunately, this makes websites with multiple resources on their site quite sluggish because of the additional overhead of establishing a new connection for each resource. There was a similar issue ages ago (back in the MSIE 5.0 era) where a very similar bug would surface if KeepAlive was on.

A better fix is to install Mozilla or Firefox and use that as your browser instead.

Quotes of the Day

"Why would I want to drive a car that looks like a basket?" - Me commenting about the PT Cruiser convertible

"My head hurts, unless I can get some catered service around here, I'm going to call the president!" - Troy from "The Apprentice"

Synthetic Oil Life Study

If you drive a car, you may be interested in this http://neptune.spacebears.com/cars/stories/oil-life.html. These guys are running synthetic oil (first they tried Mobil 1, now they are running Amsoil) and taking samples of the oil every 1000 miles and seeing how it holds up. There are a number of different goals of this study.

1. To see how long you can safely run a synthetic oil.
   
2. How do Mobil 1 and Amsoil compare.
   

I've been running oil analysis reports for my Subaru WRX as well which has allowed me to comfortably run oil change intervals of 7500 miles.

The forums at BobIsTheOilGuy are a great resource for those of you interested in automotive lubrication.

Free Speech and eVoting

'Why I Like Howard Stern' - Best summary of why people enjoy listening to Howard Stern I've come across. If things continue as they have been, it won't be long until the majority of good content will only be available through un-restricted formats such as satellite radio and the internet as media giants get bigger. Could these large media companies be shooting themselves in the foot by pulling the knee jerk reaction instead of thinking of the future?

While a lot of people are real gung-ho about eVoting, I'm not so sure it's ready yet. Being a software developer myself, I know how difficult it is to design and build a fool-proof, reliable and redundant system. Unfortunately, the current solution deployed does not meet those standards. See
'Campaign launched to ban digital ballots' and related links from google.

Links of the Day

Here's Dan Gillmor's take on the recent controversy surrounding Clear Channel's decision to take Howard Stern off their channels.

Is it bad or good for you? This BBC article explains the benefits of strong coffee.

Of particular interest to me (and my wife, Wendy) is that inhaled steroids for allergy relief are safe for pregnant women and their unborn baby. Given that Wendy is allergic to just about everything under the sky and inhaled steroids provide the most effective relief, this is good news for when we decide to have kids!