Hey all,
I just thought i'd post a log of my Megasquirt install as there seems to be very few of them documented for falcons. I bought the biggest and best (the MS3) but without the MS3x board for reasons explained below. I have built the megasquirt already - with three high current spark outputs and a PWM IAC circuit off the mainboard, nothing terribly exciting and its all documented on the megasquirt website so I won't go into any detail.
My AUII falcon currently runs off mixer gas (STAG-100 system) which I hate, so the ultimate goal of this project is to get rid of the STAG-100 front end completely and replace it with an injected gas setup running off the megasquirt. The reason I didn't buy the MS3x is because i've already asked around - and LPG injectors require a special DIY circuit to be constructed - hence i'll build my own expansion board using the MS3x headers when the time comes.
I'm breaking this up into three phases:

Phase 1: Install Megasquirt in parallel with the stock ECU, with the megasquirt controlling fuel (batch mode off the main outputs) and spark, with the stock ECU taking care of the transmission (so I need to avoid entering LHM). I also bought an LC-1 wideband sensor to allow me to tune it accurately. The Mixer system will remain, but I should get a slight improvement as I can tailor the spark map to the LPG setup (not expecting much gain).

Phase 2: Remove mixer system and replace with injected setup, at this stage I will also completely replace the engine loom because the LPG installers REALLY f**k that up - I hope to run petrol and LPG off the megasquirt with a fuel and spark table for each fuel. I also want to setup staged injection so that when the LPG injector duty cycle reaches a certain limit the petrol injectors will SUPPLEMENT the LPG, from fiddling around in tunerstudio it appears I can do this - but I haven't heard of anyone doing this before.

Phase 3: This will be my favourite part - removal of the current engine and gearbox to be replaced by an XR6 Turbo engine and a T56 transmission - still running off injection gas from the megasquirt. I'll also try and get VVT happening as well - this is going to be a long time coming, as I gather funds for the engine and box (which won't be cheap).

Sorry about the wall of text, onto the worklog:
My engine as it stands now:

Nothing noteworthy - runs great, uses a little oil (has done 220000km) but otherwise nice and reliable. I picked up an EA thermostat housing so I can add another coolant temp sensor - this still needs to be cleaned up and mounted.
I have installed and calibrated my LC-1 sensor already after navigating the jungle of wiring from the ECU:

However the day got away and I haven't progressed any further - hopefully tomorrow i'll have time to install the Megasquirt (sensors only at first - to double check everything works as it should) and then onwards from there.

Thanks for reading, Thomas.

should be a very interesting build thread...keep us posted!

I apologize in advance for the photos - the only digital camera I have is my phone, and whilst its good when its bright (sunny day), I awoke to the following:

Miserable rain.... so I moved the AU under cover and got to work. First order of business was connecting power to the Megasquirt along with some sensors:

Power: +12V (switched with ignition), this is pin 71 and pin 97 of the EEC-V connector, coloured red. Megasquirt only requires a very small amount of +12V current (enough to run the ECU basically) and only one wire is used here.

Ground: Ground - this is available on pins: 24, 25, 51, 76 and 77, and was black with a green stripe and grey dashes (I don't know why they didn't use black....). I hooked 24, 25, 76 and 77 to the Megasquirt, but not 51 because the lpg installers had already tapped into this wire and I feel 4 grounds should be sufficient (but more is better - the megasquirt will draw a lot of current through ground).

VR sensor: (RPM) - this stumped me for a while, my (Gregory's) manual lists this as pins 21 and 22 (correct) but had the colours reversed for some reason. Anyway, you want to tap into the brown wire at pin 21 and DO NOT connect the gray (pin 22) to megasquirt ground. This is because the stock ecu biases the VR sensor negative to 2.5V, so connecting this to the megasquirt ground (like the megasquirt wiring diagram illustrates) will create a short and probably kill your stock ecu.

EDIT: Turns out the the bias is only a weak bias to detect faults - the VR negative can be connected to ground (which is my current configuration).

After this, turn the ignition to "on" and adjust the lower pot (R56) to match the bias voltage - you can measure the bias voltage from the stock ecu at R48 and the megasquirt reference voltage at R54 - you want the two values to match. After this adjust the hysteresis pot (R52) about 2 turns clockwise, although you will need to experiment with this.

Throttle position sensor (TPS): Pin 89 and green with a black stripe - hooks right up to megasquirt, do not wire the 5v reference to the TPS - this is supplied by the stock ECU, you should be able to hook up the ground connection but it isn't needed so I didn't.

EDIT: I was getting EPIC noise on the TPS line - I strongly recommend connecting to a ground. I also intercepted the 5v line and supplied it off the megasquirt - though this may not be necessary.

Coolant Temp Sensor: I will be using an EA thermostat housing with a separate sensor, so I ran new wires to the housing - due to rain and missing bolts I haven't installed the housing/sensor yet, but the wiring (including plug) is there and it won't take long.
Something that I noticed that none of my research gathered is that the EA thermostat housing has THREE tapped holes, two large ones (one for the coolant sensor and one with a connector that some small rubber pipes attach to) and one small one for something else. I will plug up one of the large holes with the old ford sensor (which snapped off during removal, leaving me with a nice brass "plug") and a bolt + o ring (which I have to buy) for the smaller hole.

Air Temp Sensor: Again, new wires were run to allow a dedicated air temp sensor for the megasquirt - from what i've read, on an NA car this can be located anywhere in the intake - I chose the filter box as its convenient and easy to get to. Here's a pic of it mounted:

I used some silicone to seal the sensor, but it probably wasn't needed (pretty tight seal) and the excess was cleaned up soon after this photo. And here's a pic of the inside:

And finally a pic of its new home, complete with sensor wires running to the Megasquirt.

Manifold Air Pressure (MAP): The megasquirt requires you to run a vacuum line from the engine bay to the ECU box. I used a Y fitting to tap into the line that goes from the intake to the fuel pressure regulator and ran the line alongside the new loom.

I've chosen to locate my megasquirt under the passenger seat with the loom to run up the centre console, behind the glovebox and onto the stock loom. At this stage I have completed the loom but have not wired spark, injector or idle outputs at the stock ECU as I can't run off the megasquirt just yet (due to no coolant temp sensor). I have tested the sensors whilst it was running off the stock ecu and everything works. However, the VR sensor MUST be configured for rising edge trigger, and this requires a power cycle (which I missed initially - resulting in a lot of wasted time). I also had a dodgy negative terminal at the battery, which was soon remedied with some sandpaper.

At the moment everything is working as it should, and i'm looking forward to installing the thermostat housing + coolant temp sensor to start tuning.

Also, i'm trying to write everything down so its easy for someone else to repeat the install - let me know if i've missed anything.

Last edited by thomas505 on Mon Oct 31, 2011 2:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Small update before I get to work today, most important of which is it isn't raining... so I am getting the thermostat housing and coolant temp sensor in. Anyway a few photos I couldn't take yesterday because it was getting too dark, engine loom to the left, but on the right is what I need to hook up (both injector banks, three spark outputs and idle - these all require the stock ecu to be disconnected, and because I hadn't installed the coolant sensor I refrained from doing it).

The two thick black leads with connectors on the end are for the Innovate LC-1 wideband. Something interesting i've noted so far is that using the innovate LC-1 default setting on the megasquirt it reads about 0.9 below (ie: richer) what the innovate software tells me (having hooked the innovate via serial), i'll have to look into this at some point but it shouldn't be an issue as yet.



Here's a pic of the wiring routed behind the glovebox, you can also see the MAP vacuum line.



Here's the finished loom (bar one wire for tableswitch I conveniently forgot - but I need to make a circuit in the MS3 anyway, so i'll leave that until i've got it running of the megasquirt). Even though it will be hidden under the centre console, I tried to make it as neat as possible and i'm happy with the result.



The next two are a view of the (EA) thermostat housing, I put this up because I haven't seen a single photo of this previously - note the two sensor holes (filled with crap atm - I plan to attach this to the block to secure it, then crack these off as they're quite solid) and the single smaller hole which I need to plug (if anyone knows what this is for please let me know) - and of course the heater pipe hose attaches down the bottom as normal.





My girlfriend has kindly offered to donate her camera to my cause (well, for a little while anyway ) so better photos from Saturday! I fear by then everything hardware will be done though, we will see.

Anyway, off to work - will report again in the afternoon with a (hopefully) megasquirt powered engine .

Thanks, Thomas.

I'll start with a pic of an EA thermostat housing beside an AU one, AU is on the right and as you can see nowhere to screw in a coolant temp sensor - also the small hole on the EA thermostat housing that needs to be plugged can be seen.



First task was to swap the thermostat housings over, this couldn't be easier, everything lines up perfectly. Only thing to note is the top sensor port (where I put my sensor) is VERY close to the radiator hose, and I actually had to rotate the sensor 90 degrees or so before I could connect up the plug. A pic below shows the EA housing in place without the thermostat cover or hose.



And another angle



After this I replaced the thermostat cover and hose before remembering to plug the smaller hole... Off they came and I started screwing in a bolt that I had test fitted and judged to be the right size. Well, before it was even half way in *BANG* massive crack down the housing... And now my EA housing is useless.

After I stopped swearing, I thought I may as well try to drill and tap a hole in my existing housing (as it took a fair amount of doing to find an EA housing - most wreckers around my area stock EF and up). So I went for a drive to uni and asked the guys at the workshop for a drill bit, a tap and some advice. Half an hour later, they had finished doing it for me - see pic below.



I learned that the sensor uses a tapered thread and to just nip it up until it seals (using some sealant), I also discovered I had cracked the EA housing where the sensor went in as well. I'm reasonably sure that the smaller thread was tapered too (it would explain why it cracked the housing), as I really wasn't using much force to screw in the bolt (the threads were dirty and I assumed the extra resistance was due to that).

Anyway, drive back home and on goes the drilled/tapped housing with generous amounts of sealant everywhere (actually did this twice due to a little f**k with a gasket) and after a quick drive the sensor seems to be sealing properly (but I didn't get the system up to full pressure just yet). I was having a bit of a problem with the heater pipe, but re-seating it seems to have fixed it (will keep an eye on it). Obligatory picture of the new housing in place:



Another (crappier) angle:



By this stage i'm pretty wet (it had been drizzling on and off all day) and its nearly dark so unfortunately I will have to wait until tomorrow before hooking up the megasquirt outputs... However I took a datalog of the test drive and everything looks sweet, didn't lose sync even up near 4500rpm and all the sensors seem to be reading as they should .

I was expecting a little feedback considering there aren't many (detailed) worklogs of ECU installs, especially for a Megasquirt in a falcon. I shall assume that the lack of replies means that i'm doing such a good job detailing every step .

Thanks, Thomas.

Success! Today's first job was to wire in ignition outputs, I started with a tune bradders had kindly donated to the cause. This however generated some fairly epic backfires (it did eventually start, which I was stoked about), but after changing the cranking advance to 20 degrees (which is what bradders had) I was *reasonably* set.

Spurred on by my success I wired in the idle valve next (I should add at this point, the stock ecu was supplying the cranking pulse on petrol to start the engine, at which point the gas ECU would immediately take over and control the mixture). This was quite weird to tune (for me anyway) because on top of the PID values (which I understand) there is a lot of other "ancillary" settings such as delays and the like. During the early idle tuning I was dropping quite a few revs and nearly stalling (and sometimes actually stalling) often - usually accompanied with a backfire.

At this stage, I took a break - the backfires were starting to piss me off. Armed with some more knowledge I decided to try the base ignition map (that came with the firmware), and this was MUCH better (in terms of not backfiring - I bet it is much worse in terms of power/economy) - at this stage I had tuned the idle pretty reasonably well.

Now that I was happy that the car starts and runs I decided to mount the megasquirt under the passenger seat and reattach the centre console and glovebox - pics below - with the seat fully forward:



And fully back:



When I can be bothered (ie: once i'm happy with everything) i'll reroute the cables under the seat rail (which requires removing/loosening of the rail) and move the megasquirt much further forward to keep it well out of the way.

Anyway, one last bit of inspiration hit me - I went to http://www.tiperformance.com.au/technical.html and shamelessly downloaded the AU2+ Intech 6 definitions. Here I hit a snag, the EEC-V uses 9x12 spark tables where the megasquirt uses 16x16, I tried to make megasquirt use a smaller table or interpolate the EEC-V tables into 16x16, with no real succes.

I thought why not just copy the EEC-V table into the megasquirts 16x16 table - adjusting the rpm and map points, the rest of the table going unused as the engine will never get to those points (however, if it did - the very safe base map was left to fill the cells). I realise this isn't ideal, but it gives me a great spark map to start with, and very little chance of engine damage - (the EEC-V definition actually had 4 different spark maps, I copied them all into excel and then made another table with the minimum advance from all 4 - this is what i've used).

Alas, I haven't gotten further than this - I wanted to make sure my spark map and idle were set before trying to tune the injectors (I know they're all interrelated, but this way I minimize the amount of work I do per step), so when I hook the injectors up I just need to tune the VE table (and all the enrichments).

If anyone has any tips/suggestions for tuning (anything) i'm more than welcome to hear them.

Thanks, Thomas.

your thread is great but I think it would be better with an overview first so we can understand why your doing some of the things your doing...such as:

did u use an eecv 104pin connector to hook up to the megasquirt?

what std falcon sensors are u using and what ones have u replaced...what are u using to control the coil pack...

Ok, the reason i'm installing a megasquirt is to get rid of a problem i've been having with running petrol after gas for a while (petrol runs far too rich). I have not used an EEC-V adapter as I need the existing ECU functioning (plus its an extra expense) - I have simply spliced into the existing loom (for shared inputs) and cut elsewhere for outputs (so far spark and idle).

As far as sensors go, they're pretty much covered in my second post. I haven't replaced any sensors at all, i've shared the Throttle Position Sensor and Crank Angle Sensor while I have added a second Coolant Temperature sender and a second Intake Temperature Sender (and technically another MAP sensor, but the Megasquirt pretty much requires this).

For controlling the coils, I used BIP373 coil drivers (one came with the megasquirt + 2 extra which I bought from www.diyautotune.com) a great guide to installing them can be found here. AUII falcons used wasted spark and for the time being i'm using the standard coil packs (though an upgrade down the track will be individual LS1 coils for each cylinder).

Anyway, hope this answers your questions.
Thanks, Thoma.s

Hey everyone, today after more fiddling around with spark and idle (i'm pretty happy now) I decided to hook the injectors up to the Megasquirt. Before I did this however I wanted to run the car on petrol so I could have a comparison... no dice. Turns out if you cut the spark outputs on an EEC-V it will cut the injector outputs too (but oddly not the cranking pulse... it will start on petrol, flare to 1500 or so and then die). This most likely explains the crappy starts i've been getting .

Anyway, half an hour later the megasquirt was hooked up to the injectors and to my amazement it started right up (with NO changes to settings) obviously once started it ran like a wet turd because the VE table wasn't set particularly well (its only a very generic tune to get you started - which it did). Anyway, I tried importing an EEC-V map, I tried using a map that bradders had given me but all to no avail. I eventually caved and bought the upgraded version of TunerStudio (lots of extra features + most important to me, autotune).

The autotune is amazing, after driving home from Newcastle (about 40km) there is already an improvement on petrol - I will continue to run autotune for quite awhile until i'm happy the tune is close enough for me to start refining. The only downside I can see is that auto tune will only work if you get the engine to operate at a specific point in a table - my drive was basically a fat diagonal strip across the table, so it can't do all the work for you.

Anyway, not much else to say.
Thanks, Thomas.

hey buddy this is cool s**t ..

just cause no one else is posted dont let that stop U..;.im interested!!!

Heh, thanks for the feedback .

Sorry for the lack of updates, but sadly my power steering hose has decided to leak - halting all progress for the time being. A new hose is in the mail and I should have it this afternoon (and installed hopefully). Other than that, I was having a sync loss problem during crank - I have resolved this and it now starts much more consistently (but I haven't tuned cranking pulse widths yet, due to power steering issues).

I shall also get in touch with an automotive engineer before commencing work on the LPG install to double check everything i'm doing is legal and won't effect compliance.

Stay tuned... Thomas.

Well power steering hose is in and working (no leaks YAY!) - didn't bother with a pic because well its a hose... Anyway, more tuning to be done - I want to sort out startup completely, make it nice and reliable (ie: back to the way it started earlier) and I still need to tune large areas of my VE table + acceleration enrichment def. needs adjustment.

Stay tuned.

Good work! Glad the stock maps could help

Thanks! Wasn't sure how TI Performance would feel about it but thanks for the kind words (I did think about a J3 chip, but ultimately decided to go for the Megasquirt for more flexibility/options + its more challenging ). Get to drive the falcon again today, hopefully I can get some things dialed in.

Thanks, Thomas.

Small update - still having sync loss issues during cranking, and after posting on the megasquirt support forums I think I have a solution. I will buy some shielded cable to run from the VR sensor directly to the megasquirt - this should give perfect sync to the megasquirt at a cost of no tach input to the stock ecu. Then I connect VRoutinv (from the megasquirt mainboard) to the VR+ of the stock ecu. The theory is the 0-5V square wave supplied by VRoutinv (which is the decoded VR signal) should be detected by the stock ECU, as it provides a 2.5V bias to the VR sensor and the square wave goes 2.5V either side of this.

I'll be able to try this out sometime next week (heading down to Wollongong for the weekend) and at the same time i'll wire in the ground wire for the TPS (i'm getting a very noisy/horrid signal) plus VSS and Tach out (i'll slowly migrate everything I can to the Megasquirt). I'm also thinking of mounting the megasquirt mainboard inside a gutted ECU so I can use the stock wiring harness (plus some of the unused pins) to connect to the megasquirt - this will make things A LOT easier and neater, but I must first get rid of the auto trans which won't be happening for a while.

Thanks, Thomas.