[tyler2013]

New to the forum, thanks for the add

Been using BE with a QH for going on 5 years now.

Recently stole my 5.0 out of my mustang and put it in a F150
AFR heads, Cobra intake ported, cam, etc

Anyway for the first bit of the swap i used the trucks Upper and Lower manifold just to ease the swap. Hooked the QH up to get it close enough to drive around.

Then went ahead and used the mustang manifold and TB. Once i had this done i went to edit most of my parameters to match what i had going in the mustang

I am using Sailorbob's AHACB strategy

And it has worked fine up until this point. This weekend while i about had her dialed in close enough for the first test drive and boom, engine stalls, fuel pump priming. All the signs of a corrupt tune. So i erased memory off QH and reloaded it with an older tune, same tune, any tune, same outcome. Soon as the ignition is on, fuel pump primes.

When i removed the QH from the ECU and turned the ignition back on, no prime. Or if i go the the hardware tab in BE and set to stock tune, the fuel priming stops. But i cannot load a tune successfully. it has done this once or twice before. But it cured its self. Now it just makes clicking noises in my fuse box. and continues to prime the fuel pump

I did cut MAF wires and swapped them to the other side. but they are clean crimped and heat shrunk sealed. i checked the connections to ensure i had ground in the two middle prongs on my MAF plug. Everything checks out, actually i have datalogs of everything working correctly up until this issue

Battery on the QH is 2.7v
USB Cable is brand new
Cleaned J3 port

When i look under the hardware tab, configure QH and look where my tunes should be saved, it is just symbols and letters (corrupted)

Has anyone had a similar issue? i am trying to get a hold of Moates and send this chip back and see what they think. Any help would be greatly appreciated, i am dead in the water right now.

[jsa]

Yes I have had the garbage in the tune description positions. QH was failing for me. Send yours back to moates.

[cgrey8]

I too have had this happen once and only once. What it seemed to be is there's a particular string of characters that sets the on-board processor to start writing/updating its flash programming. This should only ever happen when you are actually intending on programming the device. However garbage evidently got sent that just happened to fit the signature of that write-to-flash command and it corrupted the flash memory with garbage. Keep in mind, this area of memory is not normally accessible to us. It's the part of the QH that gets written at the factory and tells the QH processor how to be a QH.

When Craig received my damaged QH, he put it on the bench, reflashed it with a good flash image and the QH was back fully functional and it's been working for me ever since. So it's likely no physical damage, but it is non-functional all the same and will require being sent back to Moates to be fixed...all this assuming the problem you are experiencing is the same as mine.

The good news is it's a rare occurrence. And it seems to only happen on tune writes. I don't do so much changing of tunes anymore, but there for a number of years, I was constantly tweaking with this or that just to see what'd happen. So I've written to mine hundreds of times before this showed up as an issue and I've written to it dozens of times since this incident. It's a luck-of-the-draw kind of event when this happens. You should go buy a lottery ticket.

[jsa]

In my case it started occurring occasionally and within 2 weeks degenerated to total failure.

[cgrey8]

In my case it started occurring occasionally and within 2 weeks degenerated to total failure.

That may be something else then. What I described happened once, broke the QH completely, and the QH wasn't going to function at all until I sent the QH back to Moates.

My computer, I think, would recognize it as a QH USB device when I plugged it in. But no communication beyond initial USB identity handshaking was possible. That initial stuff is all done by the FTDI USB chip in order to setup the serial (COM port) connection to the actual QH processor. Once that connection is established, FTDI is just marshalling the data to/from the computer to the QH processor.

Anyway, you still should go to the Moates website, create an RMA. And then mail the QH back to them for repair. Depending on the problem, they may not even charge you for the service.

[tyler2013]

Thanks for all the input, i have sent the QH back to Moates, (did the express RMA). So in the next few days we shall see if it was just the QH.

Little more insight, it actually lost the tunes once while driving. And i believe now it was the beginning of the end for my QH. And that was about a month before it finally gave up.


I forgot who i spoke to but he mentioned also that the capacitors in my ECU could be giving me a hassle, that they only have a 20-30 year life span. So if a new QH doesn't help. Ill spend $80 and get a new computer. And if that fails.....can of gas and matches

[cgrey8]

Yes, intermittently people are experiencing the electrolytic caps in their 30 year old EECs starting to bulge and give up the ghost. They generally are repairable. The sized used are fairly standard and not difficult to acquire. If you have a soldering iron, it's just a matter of getting the bad one(s) removed and cleaning the pads well enough to get the new one(s) in place to be soldered in. The caps are about the only thing on the board that degrade. Most all the other components should last significantly longer. In fact, it's likely you'll experience replacement caps go bad before something else does...assuming you don't have a catastrophic event that blows a component (e.g. short an injector wire while the engine's running).

Another common failure for QHs was the battery. In the early versions, they were soldered onto the QH, and the QH pulled from the battery any time the ignition was OFF thus giving them a life of about 2-3 years before failure. BTW, this is something I pointed out to Moates on the beta versions of the QH that I said would be problematic...and I was proven right.

The newer QH designs use a standard coin cell holder so they can be user-serviced. And an even newer revision added circuitry to use the always-on KAM 12v power from the J3 port to hold your tune memory up. So theoretically, the only time the coin cell should be drawn from is when you disconnect the vehicle battery or physically disconnect the EEC or QH. With this mod, the coin cell should have no problems lasting its entire shelf-life of roughly 8-10 years. I've got coin cells in my cube here at work that are well over 15 years old, still showing above 3v. Up until this mod, you had to make it a regular maintenance thing to check the QH battery voltage every so often to make sure it wasn't getting weak...or just proactively swap the battery once a year just to ensure that you didn't get stranded somewhere with a dead QH battery and no laptop to reload a tune with. I've gotten caught by the dead QH battery problem twice over the years. Fortunately both times, I did have my laptop with me. I've yet to have a problem with the latest QH board rev. And I honestly don't expect to now that the battery is truly a backup solution, not the primary power source for keeping your tunes in the QH memory.

[tyler2013]

Ok, closure

The QH was the issue, dont know what failed on it. but i have a new QH (Express RMA)

I put it on, and bam fixed. Super simple, even though i spent close to 1 hours messing with things trying to resolve it when all i needed to do was wait on Moates to get me the new one.

Have to clean all my iridium plugs with my cleaner. And begin tuning it tomorrow

Even though it is pointless based on the fact i am going to take the exhaust completely off and put on my 1-3/4 headers and 2.5'' dual exhaust. Cast manifolds on these are straight shit

Will have more question i am sure, trying to get a manifold and TB from a mustang to work with the trucks ECU. So if anyone has any threads they want to attach to this of some guys that did a good write up of mustang/f150 swaps please do. Still have to hook up my throttle cable and air filter plumbing. But have the battery on the driver side now and im pretty close to getting her gigged. Thanks again for the input fellas.