[LeadHead]

So without being "that guy", what happened to everyone? I took a few year hiatus from EEC tuning because life got in the way, but it now appears the EEC Tuning community is nearly dead? Even decipha's forum appears to be a ghost town (along with most of the content from years ago that seems to be missing now?)

What happened? Is the EEC-IV/V tuning community just drying up & moving on to bigger and better things, or are people congregating somewhere else these days?

[ChsReb]

Lots of 20 & 30 somethings around here are still modifying cars. Most just don’t want to spend the months long learning curves for retuning or should I say reprogramming a Computer controlled car. That means carburetors are still king of the roost for now anyway.

Gearheads still hate the Prius, and EVs in Coastal SC. ICE SUVs and Crossovers are still the Soccer mom’s car. Teslas are still rare. I see one, maybe, every other time I leave the house. EVs are still the toys of the doctor and accountant, and not the welder or factory worker. Only a rabid environmental fool would challenge a ICE Hot Rodder in this state.

[LeadHead]

I mean the people tuning EEC-IV/EEC-V powered vehicles. This forum used to be much more active when I was last around.

[ChsReb]

As you said: “Life got in the way.”

Another reason for the decline in participation here is simple economics. We just had a bunch of people lose their jobs. Rehiring is underway, but it takes time to get your life back to normal. It takes $2000 to $3000 more to do a computer car vs. a carburetor car. Things are still tough. Gas is $1 or more per gallon than prepandemic. Natural gas is really pricy. It might cost double if you use it to heat your house this winter. I think a whole bunch of people have put any car project on the back burner.

[sriner86]

I think a lot of it has to do with advertising. Holley and Megasquirt get a lot of publicity. Stock EEC tuning not so much. It seems like it's come a long way since I first found out about it. But I'm not a tuner.

[cgrey8]

I haven't followed what updates and features MegaSquirt has been doing. However I have to assume they have kept up with technology. With development platforms like the Beagleboard/bone and Raspberry Pi, I'm actually amazed there aren't more open source efforts out there.

As for Holley, I am VERY impressed with some of the offerings they have. I watch Youtube channels where Holleys are used (specifically Cleetus McFarland) and on there, his main tuner Kevin of KSR is their Holley guru. And each time they mention all the things that are possible with Holley stuff, it makes me envious of the things the stock EEC tuners never had and never will. There's just no way to get some of that functionality without both customer hardware and firmware to make use of it. For drag racing, some of the really cool things they have are sensors on the suspension that pull spark advance & lower boost if the computer detects wheelies or loss of traction. You can also get custom spark/boost curves based on what gear you are in. So 1st gear takeoffs don't throw the entire might of a 1500hp engine at the wheels on take-off...but can gradually introduce that power as the vehicle gets moving and can potentially plant it. Granted this fine control of take off is only useful to drag racers that are in the sub 9s (1/4 mile). But just the fact that the hardware is capable of these kinds of things is just so cool.

The kinds of things I've wanted for stock EECs are the kinds of things that should be possible, are:

• Refactor fueling logic to use WBs instead of HEGOs to allow for full-time Closed Loop operation.
• Individual cylinder AFR detection/learning.
• Individual cylinder fuel control so if one cylinder consistently runs rich or lean, you can adjust for that.
• Individual cylinder detonation detection/learning
• Individual cylinder spark advance control. If one cylinder is always the one that detonates before all the others, this would allow you to retard timing for only that cylinder allowing other cylinders to get more advance if they can take/tolerate it.
• Different spark/fuel maps based on gears.
• Implicit gear detection based on speed (obviously only works if the wheels aren't spinning)
• Max Fuel economy learning while cruising. Few people care about this one in most performance cars, but I find it possible to do in logic. And for those of us tuning daily drivers, this could be quite useful particularly when gas prices get up above $3/gal.
• OBD-II value overloading for things like overloading the VIN number to something else. This is mainly to allow people that have to get emission tested to override the values sent to the state computer. But of course, you could also do things like report secondary cats present and reporting all is good even if they are removed.

Some of these can't be done in the very old EECs just because there's not enough memory in them. But for the newer EECs, I think some of this is quite possible. Nobody has ever developed them because programming/reprogramming/debugging assembly is such a PITA without proper embedded system tools to work with. But with custom hardware capable of replacing the EEC, all these things and more are quite possible and by today's standards, not even that hard to do. The hardest part of all this is making a UI that is easy to understand for the user. But with modern technology, you could easily do all this, including serving the UI to the user via an embedded webpage from a single device. Then it wouldn't matter if you were accessing the hardware from a laptop, tablet, or phone.