darrenjlobb's Adaptronic Managed Compound Blown Derv Bus Build

[Paul_13]

Sweet

[NaughtonGAA]

Looks ace, whens this update going on youtube?

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[darrenjlobb]

Overdue update time.

Spent alot of time over the xmas / new year period turning spanners on this thing, so quite a bit has been sorted out.

Main task was to wire up the engine  / management. As is fairly obviously with injector / pump choice, this build has gone down the common rail route at long last, after many years of running varying setups with mechanical rotary style injection pumps. The biggest issue I have always had with going down the common rail route was just the lack of functionality, or at least I should say, easily accessible functionality of the "stock" EDC15 ECU's. Problem being they were made to do there job, and not really anything else, so huge amounts of time and effort seem to be required to "force" them to do what you want, and still lack inputs / outputs and advanced capabilities. So in the end decided that wasnt going to be the best route for me, and took the plunge into a fairly risky but hopefully interesting route by buying an Adaptronic E1280 out of AU, with an injector driver board from the Netherlands to enable me to drive the solenoid style injectors on the engine from the normal injector outputs on the ECU.

The main drive for this was parts just down to nature of the setup I have put together, CP3 pump, bigger injectors, VNT turbo/s and alot of other aftermarket stuff going on, getting everything to work even in principle on a stock ECU just seemed like alot of effort. The E1280 without going into to much detail is basically a very capable ECU which has a somewhat "modular" setup, in which you can pretty much design your own logic to perform just about any task you want, rather than just being stuck with basic ECU operations. This seemed ideal for me in the long run with compound VNT turbos to control, different fuel pressure regulation system, and other electronic stuff going on. Along with the fact the ECU can be used in any other vehicle in the future...petrol or diesel.

So anyway first step was to enclose both the injector driver board and turbo actuator drive board into some suitable enclosures as they are supplied as a bare printed board. The smaller board is to allow me to control the electronic "Hella" accuators directly from the ECU. Without it the ECU wouldnt be able to provide enough current when there is strain on the veins.









As you can see I just mounted some connectors on the box to make it easy to connect / disconnect from the car at any stage.

Next step was to mount some bulkhead connectors to the car to allow me to make the engine looms completely dissconnectable from the car. So drilled some holes and mounts and test fitted those:




Decided to split the loom into two, an injector harness, and main harness, that way the injector wiring is totally separate to everything else. And was able to use connectors with the correct current rating.

So started by making up the injector harness, was actually able to use the stock plugs and wires here as plenty of length in them:



And all wrapped / finished:




Then onto the main harness, started by terminating tails onto the car side of the connector, I wanted to terminate everything now, as its hard to get back into these once all together, so terminated every pin and ran back to the ECU, then spare wires can be tapped into in the future with minimal effort!








I also decided at this point due to the amount of pins already being required for the management, that I would keep the existing "stock" functions on the stock connector, given the car was already wired for it, and it all works just fine. So that is just things like the reverse light, alt energiser, starter energiser etc). So I cut out all the stuff I didn't need and re made the stock loom:




Then started measuring up for the main harness, using old wiring etc to get lengths all correct:





Marked up the mockup loom on some cardboard, and then made up a new harness with new cable to match the drawing:





Sheaved up and ready to terminate:



Getting the end ready to terminate, the shielded cable is for the reluctor style crank sensor:





And all finished up:




Thanks for looking

[NaughtonGAA]

Gonna be amazing with how tidy everything is going to be, great update    

[Frosty]

Amazing work as always Darren, you make it look so tidy!

[Piggy]

Super effort

No spanners required there though?

[WiNgNuTz]

Absolutely awesome stuff mate, so pleased to see this coming on so well now! Echoing Dave's comments, this just looks so much better than the old bay, and the old bay was amazing anyway! Can't wait to see the finished product, gonna be an awesome piece of machinery!

[Eeyore]

omg so sexy. I have some of the overbraid and was looking up best ways to finish it and also decided that heatshrink was the best way. Interesting to see where you have gone through the bulhead. How are you getting from under the scuttle panel into the bay? Have you drilled another big hole to put all the wires through? Looks good and I hope my loom can be the same by the end of the year!

[zx_volcane]

attention to detail is insane as always, amount of effort to get that lot looking nice and tidy beggars belief - patience of a tree

[Paul_13]

Tidy as!

[tim 306td]

Honestly your knowledge and skills just amaze me I would love to bring my car down to you at some point

[bashbarnard]

ive heard of these ecus being used before but for the life of me i cant think where or why. Work looks really clean and well done im a sucker for a tidy install and this is tidy. I wasnt aware that controlling a cp3 pump on edc15 would be an issue. if not you could use edc16? saying this though im a real novice with things like this and am only starting to learn. will be good to hear her finally fire up as i daresay youre not "that" far off a test fire. bet youre getting excited

[darrenjlobb]

omg so sexy. I have some of the overbraid and was looking up best ways to finish it and also decided that heatshrink was the best way. Interesting to see where you have gone through the bulhead. How are you getting from under the scuttle panel into the bay? Have you drilled another big hole to put all the wires through? Looks good and I hope my loom can be the same by the end of the year!

Going to cut a notch in the top with rubber strip on it, just left laying on the top for time being....

Honestly your knowledge and skills just amaze me I would love to bring my car down to you at some point

Always can!

ive heard of these ecus being used before but for the life of me i cant think where or why. Work looks really clean and well done im a sucker for a tidy install and this is tidy. I wasnt aware that controlling a cp3 pump on edc15 would be an issue. if not you could use edc16? saying this though im a real novice with things like this and am only starting to learn. will be good to hear her finally fire up as i daresay youre not "that" far off a test fire. bet youre getting excited

Its not that it cant be done, infact id think the CP3 regulation would be one of the easier problems to overcome with some re calibration...Its more just the time / effort involved in learning EDC inside out to understand and do this, is time I dont really have, not to dedicated to a single management system anyway. I have always had an interest in the Adaptronic management systems, so now is the time to learn....

[kyler000]

This is a great thread. The attention to detail is great. Top work!

[twangy]

car looks great ,really well put together, keep the updates coming

[darrenjlobb]

Evening.

Got the ECU and electrical kit all mounted up now, decided to mount everything inside to keep it dry / out of harms way, and just to centralise it all for a hopefully tidier install.

First step was to cut out a piece of ally plate to use as the panel:



Then bent it into shape to fit the dash:




Then there was a fairly epic fail in taking photos, so as if by magic its appeared in the car, and all the main stuff is bolted up to it:





Before getting to far with the wiring etc, I wanted to confirm the triggering / inputs on the ECU to be sure what I had physically on the engine was going to work. So just hooked up the reluctor sensor on the crank to CAS1 input and the hall sensor on the camshaft to CAS2, and opened up the scope in software to confirm I was getting signal. First thing I noticed was the polarity was incorrect for the crank sensor, so simple job of swapping the wires (joys of built in ECU scope!) was then getting the correct waveform, and after setting ECU to look at the falling edge, was getting a correct processed trigger for the 60-2 flywheel detection. Did some math and worked out period offsets and obviously the 6 degree increments, and also the TDC offset from the reset point.

This was all looking good, but as had been a suspect on my mind from the start, the Cam reset was proving to be a pain. To explain in simple terms, the ECU needs to see a reset signal from cam / dizzy or something on the engine, so allow the ECU to know which rotation of the cycle the crank is in, as obviously each cycle the crank has to do a full two turns / 720 degrees, The HDI uses a trailing reset design on the camshaft, whereby it can see a rising edge every 90 degrees on the cam (so 180 crank degrees) and it then staggers the falling edges so it can count the number of crank pulses per each cam reset duration, which enables the ECU to detect which cylinder period its in. The advantage of this is a super quick cam sync (engine only has to turn 180 degrees before it can sync, and fire the injectors / run. The disadvantage for me, is there is no out the box way to set this up inside of Sekuku for the E1280. It is possible to achieve with custom config files, which basically lock out the trigger settings, and do the work behind the scenes. While this would have been possible, I really wanted to be able to use stock triggering within the software, to make things more flexible in the future, and save delays now having to contact Andy etc at Adaptronic to come up with a custom file for this setup...

So what I ended up doing was ripping the cam cover / rocker cover back off, and by using a slitting disk on the die grinder I was just able to get access to chop off 3 of the pickup lugs on the rear of the cam pulley, to give me the single reset pulse I was wanting:



I was now able to setup a single phase cam reset, so the ECU knows its in its first 360 degree cycle of its full 720 when it see's the falling edge of the cam reset pulse. Means the engine has to do two rev's before it syncs / fires, but its really of little bother to me!



Then needed to move the car, and got fed up with the heavy steering while trying to push it around, so decided to wire up / bleed the power steering, which resulted in a bad hose connection, so had to replace that, and then had working Epas again!:



And a very rare action shot! Can tell the Derv Mafia were around as someone else clearly had camera in hand!




Got engine loom all fixed / sorted out in the engine bay:




Bulkhead connectors hooked in:




Then started to tidy up the wiring spaghetti that had formed inside the car!




For those who are interested a brief explanation as to what is going on here, Top left is the ECU itself, An adaptronic E1280 from Au, with its main loom connector in the bottom, and from the top can just see some of the status lights, the laptops USB connection and also a serial input from an Innovate wideband controller.
Below that is the main power distro, main relay and fuse board, everything here is totally isolated from the 306's OE loom, with its own feed to +ve and earth. To the right at the top is the injector driver box as per my previous post, this basically drives the solenoids in the common rail injectors from the stock injector pulse from the 1280. Below that are some terminal strips, largely multipurpose, but basically the two 5v sensor rails, sensor grounds, and also some pull up resistors to enable some stock sensors to work.
Below that are some of the relays, obviously still in progress but for things like rad fans, epas, fuel pump, injector driver etc. Then on the right is the wideband controller, the DBW card for the turbo actuator drive, and then some gauge controllers at the bottom.


Engine at this point was motoring, and triggering correctly, so in theory, after some initial map calibration for main / pilot timing and duration etc, the engine could potentially run. But wanted to confirm my math for the triggering, and also period offset angles was correct. Or put simple, I wanted to make sure that when the ECU thinks its at x degrees, the engine actually is in that position. So bodged together a timing light adaptor so I could take a pulse from one of the un used ignition outputs to run my timing light. I can then set the ignition output to lock at 0 degrees, and then use the stock TDC mark I made on the crank pulley to confirm we are at true TDC when the ECU thinks it is.



This fantastically bodged looking devices is (just that!) basically just a coil with built i ignitor, conected to a ht lead tester LED, with the timing light inductive clamp attached, and then all wired back to the crock clips for power, and 1 extra trigger wire to connector the ign1 trigger output on the ecu. So can easily be plugged in / out whenever required.

So got this connected up, and motored the engine, and confirmed that A - the timing was stable, and B - it was exactly in time, the TDC marks lined up perfectly under the timing light strobe, so this is good news!

Shot of it in action, not that you can see much, but basically during the engine build, I marked the crank pulley and engine casting at TDC, so I could easily put a timing light on it in an accessible place!



Thanks for looking!

---

Oh and a Derv Mafia xmas meet up yard photo!

[kyler000]

? wow!

[Eeyore]

er ma gerd. D: so much win. Shame its not exactly a stealth setup but love the work as always! I hope there is a running video soon

[zx_volcane]

Nice lashup on the timing light Darren, and the action shot too got to be a contender for Tindr

Great write up on the cam reset too, I'm sure it'll be useful to others out there.

Infact big ups for going into so much detail on everything in the writeups, lots of big project threads tend to skip or gloss over the technical side.

[Dave]

Yeh Echo Toms comments on this, the attention to detail within this post only scratches the surface of what can actually be seen in the flesh. I'm proud to save I've had the privaledge of seeing this chariot in the flesh over christmas for the annual derv mafia meet up, and this has just been stepped up a notch on every level.

Darren I have to commend you on the level in which you always go above what everyone expects. Without blowing your trumpet, this build is so much more than expected now i've seen the level of detail that is required just to make it function, let alone something with so many different untested adhoc functions and modules that are well above my head! (and have to agree, after the problems with the VE we had over Christmas on my shantybus, I can see why something clever needed to get involved as much as I dislike - ECU yuck! ).

Cant wait to see it actually up and running making boost, eagerly awaiting some dyno porn.

I've no doubt this will make silly HP, and as you've always said something will end up through the side of the block before you're finished with it but please please please don't kill this thing before i've had a chance to have a go in it  

To think you almost sold the motor last year   bet you're glad you didn't now . . .

[Piggy]

Yeah as above. Dave is wise.
Amount of times we chatted last year about this...you be like 'I'll never get round to working on it. May aswel sell it'
And I be like: "NOOOOOOOOOO!"

[Matt]

Been a while since I've taken a look in here. And all I can say is wow.
Great work as always Darren! You make it look so easy!
That Ecu area must have taken some series effort to get such a clean instal! Absolutely mad!
And that engine bay.... I showed my girlfriend and even she was like "wtf" haha

Serious amounts of work! It's better every time I read

[darrenjlobb]

Video of the thing running, havent been posting videos in here as I know it can be annoying if you arnt interested, but for anyone thats new reading this there is a whole series of videos on youtube regarding this build.

Anyway figured the startup was worth posting on here so here it is, near the end of the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCqmVOasAhs


Obviously that isnt the actual "first start", given the nature of the build its not quite as simple as putting 12v to the solenoid / turn the key and I know pretty much it will fire right up. So there has been alot of messing around with base timing / triggering and various other issues to get to this point, but other than the days getting things sorted, that is pretty much the first time the car has started / moved under its own power in what I think is 4-5 years!

Thanks for looking!

[Eeyore]

yassss. Looks like itll be good for FCS 2k17 then

[dr_jekyll]

Damn [SMILING FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES][SMILING FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES][SMILING FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES] thing sounds insane!

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[unclebeast]

Thats one quick spooler...What a Beast!

[Kwik]

Nice to see this back again

[welshpug]

so satifying when you get a project to fire up when youre learning new stuff isnt it

certainly sounds like an older Di clatter at the moment, does the hdi usually have more than one injection event per stroke?

[darrenjlobb]

so satifying when you get a project to fire up when youre learning new stuff isnt it

certainly sounds like an older Di clatter at the moment, does the hdi usually have more than one injection event per stroke?

Indeed they do, so does this, except there is currently 0 pilot injection, so just running a big single pop at the moment. Turned the pilot off to help diagnose other issues, as was finding the pilot masked other timing problems, so will add it again once I get everything else somewhat sorted! That said I am not really a big person to worry about the refined sound of a "modern derv" !

[pioneer DJ paddy]

Darren i would just like to say  far play to u and the work u have put in to this car/project . You are the one that makes every one  else on here  want to do there own projects :-) you have my highest respect  can't  wait to see it on the rolling road :-)

Ps so much love for this car