cygnusx1

Oh wait...that's top secret here in the US...OH no I'm in trouble now!!! Gotta Run and hide...J/K

I really enjoy reading the articles on this site. I subscribe to the RSS feeds and browse them once and a while. I think alot of us here like gadgets and technology so here is the site. http://www.gizmag.com/ Check this out. http://www.gizmag.com/go/3062/

Welcome to HybridZ...again!

80's vintage BMW 320is seats. They are Recaro/BMW and have really firm bolstering. http://www.my2002tii.com/recaro_seats.htm http://www.2002parts.com/html/recaro_seats.html

At 2:26 in the video....all my hairs stand up straight and I get goosebumps! Does this happen to anyone else? I am about ready to srcap my project and look for a chevy V8. WOW

Umm, the ground was shaking! NICE

I use or have used, ZoneAlarm Pro Security Suite, PC-Cillan, Spybot-SD. The BEST way to keep spam out is to have two email addresses. 1) Personal, Private. 2) for ordering stuff on the web and passing around for registering to sites and the likes. Then you setup OE to bring mail in from both accounts and sort them into separate folders by setting up rules.

It's going to be wierd seeing a fast civic with big REAR tires. Definitely the way Honda should have made them. I bet he can get better MPG than when it was a four banger...lol

A good friend of mine and I were discussing cars over the phone the other night. We are both car nuts and he is a bit more in tune with the manufacturers and laws than I am. I am more into the technical side of things. He asked me a question that I had often thought about also. His 1994 200SX got in the mid 30's for mpg. My 1990 Civic got in the high 30's to low 40's mpg. Today you would have to be hard pressed to find cars that do that. I formulated that there were two reasons that mpg's are lower today than they were in the 90's. 1) Today's Heavier cars for safety and comfort. 2) Reduced emissions now compared to then. #2 is a bit counter intuitive. In order to really get very clean burns, you need the right amount of fuel. I think, in the 90's they just ran them lean and emmisions were higher and mpg higher, as a result. So, if I am correct, if slightly higher emmisions can be tolerated, higher mpg's can be had with the internal combustion, gasoline burning engine. No? If most cars could get 35mpg avg, we would cut down alot on our fuel consumption without needing to force feed undeveloped technology into the market. Don't get me wrong, I am all for looking for new ways to speed around but let's not discard what we already know that works.

Last Summer my wife and I did 2000 miles all over the Sierra Nevadas and I can't say enough about how beautiful it is, and how nice the weather is in that part of the country. The Z sounds nice but the camera muffled it pretty badly.

In an email, Matt said that the code could become damaged by wires near the spark plug wires, or a bad configuration of Megatune. My laptop did lock up a few times while connected to MS-II while the car was running, but it ran fine after that. Also, when I just purchased the unit new, assembled, it would sometimes not boot up when I plugged the power supply into the wall. SO either: A) The code was flawed from day one. I "damaged" it when I made jumper mods for the 83 dist. and added the 4-bar sensor. C) My power supply (microsoft 120v AC - 12v DC wall wart) created dirty power that damaged the code. D) My laptop some how jolted the code during tuning. E) Spark plug wires too close to other wires. (not really a problem in my car AFAIK) My bet is either A) or C)

Ahhh OK. That makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up. The chip will take the new code once the jumper is moved....assuming it was still getting power, which it was. Kind of like flash updating the BIOS on a PC. As I get older...I get denser.

I know I can reflash with the laptop but I was wondering if I could reflash if communications fail, like they did. Thanks for reloading the same code I was going to ask you to keep it the same. -Dave

Yeah take everything you read with a grain of salt. Just be glad we have choices...

I hear it's legal to carry megasquirt's in Texas...

Is there is a way to "carry a spare" something just in case this happens again? Or is there anything that I could do to load the firmware should this happen again? I would hate to get stuck and know how to fix it but not have the proper tool with me.

No Problem. Hope it all works out.

Yeah but I could not establish any comm with the laptop either.

Hmm, how did you reload the firmware without the unit powering up?

I wouldn't jump to conclusions yet. It was intermittent before it failed so It may be an electro-mechanical problem, as Z-YA said, it could be just a cold solder joint. DIY is looking at it now.

Is there an echo in here? J/K You sound exactly like I did when i got my MS-II a few months ago. You are already thinking ahead....and that always works out well. I mounted a grouding rail under the seat, attached to the seat supports and rans a heavy cable right from the battery negative. Then I just brought all my grounds back to that rail. Can't get a much better ground than that as long as you also tie the battery well to the block and the chassis.

Just a +1 for Panasonic cameras. I have a panasonic mini-dv recorder that is nearly HD. It's the model just below their HD stuff but still widescreen. It uses the 3 CCD technology and the picture looks amazing on my Samsung HD DLP TV. I would recommend Panasonic products with the 3 CCD tech. It also uses an optical image stabilizer built into the lens mechanism. I record in DVD format and just drag the folder it creates on the mini DVD to my PC hard drive. Then the floders play with any DVD software. I play them through my Media Center PC on my TV. Of course they can also be converted to any other format with software. Then I format the Mini DVD-RW and use it again. I like it.

Matt, the MS-II is on the way to you right now. I firmly believe that this is a faulty "something" on the board. It exhibited intermittent bootup since day one on the bench with a DC power supply. I would have to cycle the DC supply two to three times sometimes to get it to boot up. On the bench, when it was connected to the Laptop or the Megaview unit, it would boot up consistently. All of a sudden yesterday, it decided to stop booting up. I'm sure it's going to be an easy fix and the support from DIY Autotune has been second to none so far. I am very pleased with the whole MS experience so far. After all, my Z is all one big experiment to me!

There is a thread here somewhere about two years old where someone was building a scale tunnel. The roadblock was that the air speeds had to be several hundred miles an hour...something about reynolds numbers.....

WoW. Very nice and it really shows what the L28ET side of HybridZ is all about! Excellent writeup and photos. Got video?