Who is using M1 Build?

Hey guys,

Got a little bored so am branching out and digging into the M1 stuff now.

Just purchased:

M130 (activated, no licence),

L2 logging upgrade,

LTC 4.9 kit,

C127 display dash.

Several of my street car clients are now moving into the sequential dog-box market with products such as Samsonas and Hollinger. With this in mind, I want to offer the best setups to suit the closed loop shifting using frequency based inputs, DBW conversions for throttle blip etc.

ATM the GPA/GPR/GPR-P packages are pretty limited for the street car market IMO, missing the critical feature most of my clients would use being full Flexfuel abilities as we have an abundant access to E70-85 here.

I've got a fair idea on how I want to implement this on the M1, in a similar fashion to how I have it setup on the OEM Evo ECU's.

With a few nice additions such as closed loop boost strategies using TSS inputs for EFR kits etc.

I've tried to contact at least one package developer so far, got a little way there, however seems hard to push things the way I would like, so I guess i'll have to learn myself.

Anyone else using Build here, or better yet, developed stuff themselves?

Cheers

Ben

I've been using Build for a while now on our Toyota 86. I've used it to develop my own flex fuel system, modify a few aspects of the traction control system, and more recently to develop my own rolling launch control strategy. I also added in a charge cooling estimate table and changed the efficiency calculation to work off TPS rather than inlet manifold pressure while retaining MAP as the input for the mixture aim and ignition. I'm not a computer programmer and took this on mainly as a bit of a personal challenge to see if I could do it - Turns out I could.

That being said I personally would have a hard time justifying my time for a commercial application unless I was able to sell a large number of units. If you're looking at getting something written and you're not interested in learning to do it yourself, I'd get in touch with John Reed from John Reed Racing. He's developed a number of packages for his own use as well as for others.

As a side note, the gear cut control incorporated in the GPR package is actually reasonably complete and is a true closed loop system. It also incorporates throttle blip on down shift. I've used it with good results on a Subaru BRZ equipped with a Holinger 6 speed sequential and strain gauge gear lever. For a full paddle shift system the GPRP should suffice. Of course there are undoubtedly small tweaks or improvements possible for both packages but you need to weigh up if it's worth a development licence and the time spent learning.

Thanks for the reply Andre.

Have already spoken to John a fair bit via email, have been through his options, however its a little hard to keep solid communication with him as i'm sure he is a busy man.

His flexfuel capabilities provided in his packages are a little lacking in features to what I was looking for unfortunately.

I might have to get stuck into it myself in that case.

Would you be able to give me a snapshot of how you have your one setup?

Cheers

Ben

I simply looked at how flex fuel was being handled by other aftermarket ECUs and took the bits I liked from each. The M1 fuel model handles most of the heavy lifting with regard to the changing ethanol content and I simply set up all of the fuel characteristics (Stoichiometric AFR, density, molar mass etc) on a 2D axis vs E%. This won't always completely account for everything though so I added a fuel trim table which you can blend vs E% to align any minor discrepancies that creep in.

Ignition and boost are both handled with separate aim tables and a blend to control how much of the second table is being used. Lastly I changed all the cold start parameters to 3D vs E% so you can adjust cranking and cold start enrichment.

Personally I don't tend to aim for different lambda values between E85 and gasoline but if you wanted to it would be a simple task to add a second mixture aim table with an associated blend.

I'm very interested in the M1 Build, though I haven't had the opportunity to use it for now. We'll see what projects will happen in the near future.

How much programming skills are involved? I've basically been programming C/C++ in school since the age of 15 ... time has past since, but I still remember :)

M1Build is a free download from Motec. You can pretty much do everything other than compile your project.

It will come back to you pretty quickly if you know C++.

I just barely scraped through a 1st year programming course at university Andy, so it's safe to say I came at this with zero experience with C++. I did have a lot of help from a friend who writes code for a living and also shares an interest in cars (Lith from this forum), however if you are already confident with C++ you should pick up Build quite easily.

ok cool, I think I'll download it and take a look at it .... let's hope my coding skills get back to me :)

When you download and install M1 Build, there are a set of manuals in PDF format that are also installed, these can be found under Help | Manuals and they are very detailed, there is also a coupled of worked examples available there.