Eagletalon.net

Over the weekend I worked on getting the new Haltech Platinum Sport 1000 installed in the Talon. Previously, as I said earlier, I was running an E6S-8, which was just too limiting for me and what I want to do with the car.

So, Saturday afternoon I spent a couple of hours pulling the old ECU out of the car, and putting the new ECU into the car. It was pretty straight forward in that I was able to pull the pins out of my existing Haltech connector and install them into the new Sport 1000’s connector without too many problems. Throughout the whole exercise, I ended up having to crimp and splice about 10 wires into the system, and five of those were ground wires! The new Haltech has a concept of a set of pins exclusively for sensor ground which the old ECU didn’t have along with multiple grounds to be used for the Haltech itself, whereas the E6S only has one ECU ground pin. I also ended up re-wiring the shielded cables that the Haltech uses, since the old setup bundled all the grounds for a bunch of items into one big ball of solder (Haltech did that from the factory!)

So, after the new cables, I turned it on and hoped that it would start. And it did. Pretty easily. No drama, no issues, no problems. The battery compensation map needs to be adjusted, and it runs rich in general, but it’s not bad. I will have to do some tuning though, no doubt.

Randomly, Q16 is weird fuel. You know your brain cells are dying, and you know it’s not good for you, but you don’t mind the smell anyway. It’s weird.

I’ve been using an old Haltech E6S-8 to tune the Talon for the past two seasons, but have been pretty limited on what I

The Haltech Platinum Sport 1000

am able to do with it. I was mainly having issues with the fact that the MAP sensor algorithm on it is pretty messed up.

Early last year, I made a MAP sensor scaler to scale the voltages coming out of a 5 bar sensor down to something that the E6S would be able to handle. This helped me keep resolution on the MAP while still being able to run the amount of boost that I wanted to run. The scaler works correctly, and the MAP sensor works correctly, but the Haltech has a fit with both of them. The issue with this old E6S is that the ECU samples the MAP sensor when it’s first switched on, and uses that as the 0 position of all of it’s maps. And, the way the Haltech is setup, it’s limited to a 3 bar sensor. This should just be a software setting (The software needs to know what MAP sensor you’re using to show you where any particular load level is – IE 30psi of boost is at bar 32) – but otherwise, the E6S should just linearly scale all other values. It’s a complicated explanation and unfortunately I am having a rough time coming up with a simpler way of explaining it. What it boils down to, though, is that a 4 bar MAP sensor should make my 0 position roughly position 6 on my fuel map, but the way the E6S is setup, it’s still at bar 11. This effectively limits me rescaling my existing maps in a linear fashion, and defeats the purpose of trying to scale the signal in the first place. Other ECUs don’t work this way, not even something as old as the E6K. In addition to these limitations, it was harder to deal with having to run DOSBOX on a laptop and try to conserve power and the thing only logged about 4 or 5 samples a second on a good day, downhill. It allowed me some data, but not nearly the amount of information I really need to be able to pick up anything funky that may happen. Aside from these issues, in order to really be able to read data effectively, Mark spent a fair amount of time reverse engineering the Haltech datalogging binary information and putting together a log reader to use to read .HDL files so that we’d be able to more quickly read through logfiles, since the log screen lets you see about 12 lines at any given time in the old DOS software, and you can’t display all the data points that are logged at any given time. Welcome to 1991 :-p The plus side of these issues, though, were that I learned more about the Haltech than I ever wanted to know.

To fix this stuff, I contacted Jay at jayracing.com – he’s been around a long time and makes some other good products – I’m also running his Alternator Relo kit on the Talon. He gave me a good price on a Haltech Platinum Sport 1000. I don’t know anyone else running one, but hey I’m a glutton for punishment so I ponied up the cash for it. I decided to go with this over an AEM for a bunch of reasons. First off, the E6S, E6K, E6X and other ECU’s all use the same AMP connector. While the connector is physically different from the Sport series, the pins inside the connector are the same. If I’m good, I can remove the pins from my E6S’s connector and put them into my new Sport connector with some minor shuffling of wires. If I don’t luck out, I may need to run a couple wires, but it’s a lot better than making an entirely new harness to upgrade to a new ECU. The other main reason I chose this was because of the software. I spent a bunch of time re-familiarizing myself with the AEM software. Back in the day, I tuned an AEM for a friend of mine, and absolutely hated all of the modifier tables for everything on the AEM. I also hated the complete lack of documentation and the table values containing completely arbitrary numbers – was I modifying an absolute value, a percentage or what?! I guess when you’re running a street car and have all the street time to tune an ECU it’s one thing, but I don’t have that kind of runtime on this car so I want a simpler setup.

The new ECU Manager software from Haltech is actually not terrible, which is a compliment to them in a way. It’s much more familiar coming from their old DOS software, and is no more complex than it needs to be in order to fulfill the available tuning options. I like that I can size many maps to my liking – If I don’t want a 16×16 fuel map, I can take columns or rows out – and I can specify the values of the columns and rows if I chose to do so. I can also specify calibrations for differing sensors, with many popular sensors calibrations already programmed in the software. They also have a powerful number of setup options, and one of my two favorite things about the new hardware are the fact that I can finally setup a closed loop boost controller, and that I can setup launch anti-lag. Awesome

The fuel map I'll start out with on my new Haltech Sport 1000

My Haltech Ignition Map

Attached are a few screen shots that give you an idea about what the software looks like. The first one is a shot of my fuel map I will start out with. It’s basically a port of my map from the E6S, and unfortunately there was no conversion path from Haltech, so I threw a bunch of data into Excel and made up some interpolation formulas to transpose numbers from my old ECU over to my new one. The new ECU is also setup to use my 5 BAR map with it’s full scale, so I won’t ever have to rescale my maps for something silly like that. This map, surprisingly, only took me a couple of hours to make up. The input methods of the new Haltech software are familiar, while still allowing a more efficient way to enter data over their DOS software. It’s not the greatest of any software I’ve ever used, but it’s a step forward for Haltech, for sure.

The second map here is my Ignition map. I am running really conservative numbers on the map, and know that I will have room to play with these in the future. I should be able to add a bit more timing up top.

I’ll let you know how the install goes

So, what’s going on lately with the Talon? There’s a small list of things that I need to do that are general maintenance items, along with some other enhancements that I’m working on. They follow in no particular order:

I ordered and received a new Trans Brake solenoid for the Powerglide. The existing solenoid works okay, but seems to weep fluid from it, and I’m not quite sure why it did that. So, I’ve decided that the best thing to do is replace the whole thing. That should fix that problem

I also ordered a new brake discs for one of the front brakes. The car had a slight shimmy on the top end slowing down, and throwing a dial indicator on my discs showed that my left front was about .015 from being completely straight. The new one is .005″, which is about the same as all the other discs on the car. Now, I just have to remember to drive it around a little bit before making a run to season that one up a bit.

I have also been working on a somewhat ridiculous project – data acquisition. Oh sure, I could have gone out and purchased a complete system, but I feel that existing systems have ridiculous price to performance ratios. Most systems cost somewhere in the 600-800 range and end up having severely limited inputs. (under 5 analog inputs, and only one or two digital inputs) and I just couldn’t have that. Or, you end up spending in the $2000+ range to have some actually adequate inputs. So, I’ve created my own hardware, and am in the middle of writing software for it. The system will sport four thermocouple inputs, Driveshaft and Tachometer RPM, four digital inputs and 12 analog inputs with a full 0-5V range on them. I will be able to log lots of stuff with them. And, I have multiple inputs – four of them to be exact. The total cost for all four units will be less than the cost of the lowest end data acquisition systems I could find. Of course, this just reinforces what kind of geek I am. a cheap one!

Time to get back to working on the datalogger…

I haven’t particularly kept the site up through the 2009 season, and for that I apologize. I have been wanting to revamp large portions of the site but have not spent the time to do so. I have also had a lot of stuff happening in life that has prevented me from doing work to the car that I’ve wanted to do, so I haven’t made very many updates to the car itself.

Yes, it’s November and has been a long time since I last updated the site. I did do an update earlier this year to the layout and some of the content, and released it to the public, but it ended up making the site even more confusing. Over the past weekend though, I went through all of that, and ended up revamping the whole thing. The original site is now gone, replaced with a site that should be much more clear and concise while still providing detailed information about the build for those of you who are looking for it. With any luck, it will also help me out with Search Engines, as Google seems to think eagletalon.net is all about chromoly rollcage construction and not about my Eagle Talon at all. Traffic has dropped on the site substantially, so hopefully that will pick back up here, too.

Anyway, getting away from the site news and onto other news, in March of this year I found out that I was losing my job at the end of June. That generally puts a damper on your race season, which is why there haven’t been many updates to the site. Michigan’s economy is exceptionally out-of-shape, so it’s been a challenge to find a new position that’s right for me. But at this point, it’s been just over three months since I started work as a Software Architect for a small company in Brighton, MI – one town over from where I live. It’s a great fit for me and I enjoy working with the people I work with, so I’m back on track as far as the job front goes.

Going into race season knowing you have no job in 2 months makes for some interesting decisions to be made. Right away I purchased 10 gallons of Q16 to last the season, and pretty much sat on them it came time to attend the events that I had already planned on attending.

Event #1 was my Birthday. My favorite thing to do on my birthday is go to the track. this year? Rick, Christyn and I drove up to Mid Michigan Motorplex where I only got one run in before rain came. Clicked off a 9.70@138mph without so much as a hiccup. It was a nice pass, and I knew it would be fast within the first 60 feet. When I first heard/felt the front end land back onto the pavement I thought “That’s weird, I haven’t felt that before?” and then the car started getting a little squirrely at the top of first, right before half track. I drove through it, and then ran into some more track at around the 1/4 mile mark that wouldn’t hold my power, either. I let up around the 1000′ mark, and then slowed the car down after tripping the lights. When I came around to the timing shack, I was very surprised to get a 9.70 slip, but very happy about it at the same time. I had all intention of making another pass, but 20 minutes later the sky opened up and we had to call it a day.
Event #2 was PINKS All Out in Martin, Michigan in the beginning of July. This was a followup to last year – I was extremely dissatisfied with the issues that we had at the event in Norwalk in 2007, so I wanted to make a good showing this time around. We showed up to the track early, got a great pit stop, lucked out with great pit-neighbors and within 10 minutes of unloading the car, we had a producer from PAO come up to our pit and made my car a feature car. What’s that? Well, it means that I get to be in the lanes with all the other feature cars, they do an interview and take some footage of the car. All in all, they interviewed me for about 15 minutes, asking all sorts of questions about the car. They also spent about 1/2 an hour taking footage of the car – underneath, inside, outside, all around. It was footage for PAO:Outtakes, but none of it so far has been used for anything. I made the cutting room floor It was because the car performed horribly. I struggled all weekend with issues, and no amount of changing things up helped me out at all. I had spark plug wires pop off (valve cover gasket apparently leaked – RTV fixed it.) I wasn’t able to get up on the converter; I had ignition issues; tuning issues; all sorts of other stuff. We were also trying to slow the car down, because I do not have my IHRA license and the car has run a handful of sub 10.0 passes. when going through tech, the tech guy wrote “NO FASTER THAN 10.0!” all over my tech card. This was a little bit frustrating, but rules are rules, and I should have had the ability to break them. Anyway, poor showing for such a great beginning to an event. Had the car run well, we would have had a chance to make the show. They were calling out 10.20-10.40ET cars, so what I had planned on running would have been favorable for that group of cars. Unfortunately, all of my passes were aborted in some way.
The last event was the 2009 DSM Shootout: We had a great time – Mark came out from California and we went down to Norwalk, as usual. Met with friends and talked a lot on Saturday and then got our asses handed to us on Sunday. I competently qualified for the quick16, but was on the top end of the class barely making 9 second passes. It was hot outside, so I was down on mile-an-hour and on ET, too. The track was sticky though. Worked on a lot of small things on the car because the PINKS event brought so many questions. Before the shootout, I completely rewired the ignition setup with shielded triggers and then shielded all the high voltage lines for the coils themselves. This totally fixed all of the electrical issues that I had at PINKS.
Overall, it’s been a slow year. I am gearing up for 2010, though, because I have a lot of plans for the car. Stay tuned.

I don’t even need to actually *say* anything about this, because it speaks for itself:

I’m happy