- When it comes to fitting aftermarket standalone ECUs into late model cars,
it's fair to say it's getting harder and harder.
Our current crop of cars are incredibly technical with a lot of electronic control
modules and this makes it very difficult to remove the factory ECU.
Now we're here with Mark from Rsport Race Engineering to talk a little bit more about
what's involved with this and what our options are.
Now Mark before we get into the technology involved with these late
model cars, I actually want to rewind a little bit because I want to find out how
you got involved in tuning.
It's one of those industries that's a little bit hard to break into, not a lot of knowledge
around, particularly a few years ago so how did you get started?
- Basically we started doing a lot of circuit racing, did what's now Super2 Series.
So there was lots of data back then in those cars, it's obviously got to be more and more
as the years have gone on.
So you just kind of evolved, you wanted to keep pace, you wanted to keep looking,
you wanted to try to keep improving those cars so you just got more and more
involved in it.
You also had to maintain the engine throughout a race weekend as well so you
were always trying to optimise performance of that motor and it just developed from there.
- So for those viewers who aren't familiar, Super2, that's the feeder series basically for
the Australian Supercars Series which is the top echelon of tin top racing here in Australia?
- It's pretty much it yeah so it's a one generation old car normally.
- Alright so what was your involvement there are you sort of data engineer or are you
actually engine tuning?
- Basically data engineer and engineering the suspension and everything else as well.
- But you got involved in the engine tuning going forward from that?
- That was one section of it as well, you didn't always have your engine builder there,
just because it's a budget thing.
So you'd always be trying to make sure that the engine was running as well as it could be.
- So moving on, your business has sort of evolved a little bit and while you do a little
bit of tuning as well, more sort of around specific projects, you're now really
developing solutions for late model cars.
And can you start by talking us through where are the challenges when it comes to
developing an aftermarket ECU solution for a current generation car?
- The biggest problem is everything's CAN based.
If the car doesn't receive the CAN signal at the right moment, the numbers change
in the right sequence, that component will either not work or it'll throw a fault code
or it'll go to limp home mode.
It's one of those kind of scenarios with that car.
With a late model car, the ABS might not turn on, air conditioning might not work.
There's all kind of requests and replies that have to be within that CAN bus structure,
or the car just won't function correctly.
- I think it's still a little bit complex, even I mean well you can obviously
drive a car with no ABS or no air conditioning, maybe no gauge cluster,
but it gets a little more complicated when we're talking about dual clutch transmissions
or modern automatic transmissions where the interaction between the transmission
control module and the engine control module is essential.
So can you talk us through the process if you like, of how you actually get started
developing a solution for these cars?
- Well you really need to first off get a really good CAN bus scanner so you can
actually have a look at the CAN bus and you've got to try and work out what channels are
what, when they change, how they change, the pattern that they change in.
And then you've got to try and also relate whether the original program is done on
a full byte or a half byte structure for that particular channel and whether it's over
two bytes.
So you've got to be constantly trying to work out what they're doing.
Then you need to work out what signals the ECU's actually generating, which lines of CAN
and then how that interacts with the other lines of CAN that every other module in the
car is generating.
- Alright definitely complex and obviously we're not going to be able to get to the bottom
of this here in a short interview but I'm just interested, like let's take something really
really simple, let's say you've got a parameter that's broadcast over the CAN bus from the
factory ECU, let's say engine speed which is going to go up to the gauge cluster.
So for that one single parameter, what would be your process of finding that on the
CAN bus, sniffing that out figuring out what ID it is and how many bytes it's sent across?
- RPM's usually relatively easy, it's generally always over two bytes.
There'a an orientation, basically whether it reads left to right or right to left.
You can generally kind of work that out.
Once you've actually found the channel that moves if you like when you rev the engine,
it's reasonably simple, you've kind of got it there.
Then generally we'll regenerate that signal back into the car, remove the ECU
from the car, put maybe a dash or something else back into it, generate that signal and
see if the tacho works effectively.
It's supposed to be how it goes, the only other thing you have in that is a scaling number.
The number's just a raw number, it does move obviously with RPM but it might be
divided by five, might be divided by six.
Temperature for instance, it's usually a divide by number and then it's got an
adder as well to get it back to the value you want.
That's probably the slightly tricky bit is finding the exact adder and multiplier
to get to where you want to be.
- So can you use the likes of a factory scan tool to see, for example let's say you're
talking about a temperature, maybe engine coolant temperature, can you look at the
scan tool, see what the actual engine coolant temperature is in a digital number and
use that to help with your scaling?
- That's basically, you normally have a scan tool in there so you can see what
it is but then you really need an aftermarket CAN capture tool or a scan tool to actually
find the raw data coming back out.
- Alright so getting the data is one thing but of course you actually have to make use
of it and then be able to regenerate it and definitely not every ECU,
in fact very few aftermarket standalone ECUs can do this and I think you're basically
solely based around the MoTeC M1 product, can you talk to us about how that M1 ECU
works and where the advantages and pros are on that product.
- You really need a build package to be able to do it.
So basically with a build package you can go in and actually write the code
in the background in certain modules and that's basically how we generate the code.
So the ECU will obviously generate an RPM signal, we then take that RPM signal and
then transmit it, at whatever CAN bus speed it happens to be for that car and then
whatever scaling number or adding number is in there, we can write that in as well.
That's probably a challenge because I don't really come from a computer background
and it's been actually learning and getting your head around the code that you have
to write to get the result that you want.
- And I think again for those who maybe aren't familiar with the MoTeC M1 package,
that build that you're talking about, this essentially allows you to write
your own firmware to do whatever you want with that ECU, basically whatever
you can imagine, as long as you can write the code, you can do it.
So then you can make a package specific to a certain vehicle, that's your own
package and you can then sell it to customers?
- Yeah that's exactly how it works and you really need to be able to do it in build as well.
The generic package that MoTeC has like the GP packages, they're really good things
but they're quite defined in their CAN bus.
You can't have any kind of a custom setup at all.
With the M800 you could a little bit depending but the M1, it's very fixed.
The other thing you have is that the address that MoTeC have allocated within
that M1, when it talks to their loggers, you can quite often get a conflict with that,
with the actual car because they'll be using that address.
You've got to move things within the bus for it to work.
- You can't have two devices communicating on the same address?
- No two devices communicating on the same address will cause you an instant failure
or CAN bus crash or whatever.
- It's been great to find out a little bit more about what goes into that and of course
it's not going to be for everyone but as our cars do become more complex, it's fair
to assume that this is only going to get harder for us so fortunately there's
some smart people out there like you developing these packages so people
down the line can purchase these and actually add an aftermarket standalone
to their car so thanks for the chat there Mark.
- No worries, thank you.
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