Benefits and drawbacks of megasquirting as well as megasquirt help in Tri-State area?

Obviously, I had some learning curve climbing completed after running an MS1 setup on my car for years, but the second setup I did with it was just dead simple. I got an MS3X box with the two pigtails. It just had all the available functions already hooked up internally, and the pigtail was labeled on each individual wire. I never had to crack the case open (other than out of curiosity, when I got it).

The MS1 was a plug-n-play - it mostly interfaced with the engine through the stock engine harness, with an adapter harness made from ECU plus that plugged directly into the harness. Over time I added more functions and added wires.

For the MS3X I just redid the whole engine harness from scratch. Un loomed it, took out all the unused junk, added a bunch of new wires (DSM CAS, sequential wiring for the injectors, COP wiring). This was pretty simple to hook up to the MS3X pigtail, though.

On the MS Extra forum, http://www.msextra.com/forums/, most issue is cause by poor hardware installed. Crank signal seem to be the number 1 issue people have.

I have a 36-1 wheel welded to my crank pulley, then zero balance the crank pulley. My car have never dropped a crank signal.

Brandonium said:

I'm looking forward to changing over from D-Jet to MS as there is no 'chip' for the old Volvo pushrod setups and even if there were I wouldn't do it. Thing I am learning about MS however is that documentation sucks. I mean sure you can rely on another forum full of users to answer questions but even then users make references to items not documented.. That's the price you pay for open source.

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it doesn't actually suck as bad as it used to, but there are still some occasionally glaring gaps. You could just hop down the interstate a little and talk to a guy that's been running ms stuff on volvos for 15 years

By far the biggest problem with most MS installs, and verily most aftermarket management installs period, is suspect wiring. Not necessarily ugly wiring, but poor ground quality, poor noise isolation, etc.

Having clean grounds is critical. Having matching voltage at the injector and the ecu is also fairly critical (esp on the newer systems which is all anyone should be using these days)


The problem with noobs is generally this:
You're taking a system you don't know much about, wiring it up entirely (which comes with tricks and other fun in and of itself), then you're going to be tuning it yourself more than likely.

This all sounds fun (and it is, don't get me wrong. I still enjoy it every time 15 years later) until something doesn't work. Then you're faced with various propositions: "Did I wire the sensor correctly? Is the sensor just faulty? Is the ground good? Is the input on the box good? If you soldered the whole thing together, you also get Did I assemble the MS correctly? Is it just set up wrong in the software?"
Each and every one of those questions has it's own little rabbit hole, and more often than not you'll find that you didn't wire it up correctly (or at all, whoops), or might not have set something up in the software (this is not normally the case for basic inputs).

It used to be that you either paid someone, or spent 4-5 hours assembling your own megasquirt. For the most part, that doesn't happen now, since you can get basic functionality cheap from a microsquirt, and by the time you factor in your own time and the overall cost, building your own ms3x is not substantially cheaper than say an ms3pro-evo (which will have a couple extra inputs over the ms3x)-assuming you don't already have testing equipment and soldering equipment to do it and verify your work.

linuxman51 said:

It used to be that you either paid someone, or spent 4-5 hours assembling your own megasquirt. For the most part, that doesn't happen now, since you can get basic functionality cheap from a microsquirt, and by the time you factor in your own time and the overall cost, building your own ms3x is not substantially cheaper than say an ms3pro-evo (which will have a couple extra inputs over the ms3x)-assuming you don't already have testing equipment and soldering equipment to do it and verify your work.

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This is the main reason I chose Microsquirt. I hate soldering.

So I had been considering a Pro for my build, but Cosbys compliments of the Gold box had me interested (specially with all the problems I've been reading with the Pro). Is the gold box an almost better choice? I know its unlikely anyone has run them back to back. But just looking for opinions (will continue to read while on the plane to friggin' Sweden)

Any pro's con's to each?

Jordan

the gold box has had it's own share of issues as well, so it's probably a wash from that perspective. I like that the gold box puts the connectors on the side and not on the face.