MOTIV RE|FLEX - ADVANCED I/O INTEGRATION

[jzx_andy]

I'd grab one at this point for sequential injector spray and consolidating PI control, secondary fuel pump triggering, flex fuel and ST boost control with one unit.

While canbus integration would be amazing to have, and was the killer feature for this product in my view, I don't see it as a total dealbreaker when compared to other options. That said, I am only running the old Motiv flexfuel kit which can be migrated to a Reflex+ fairly painlessly, and am not already invested into a jb4, boostbox, aic6, or anything of that kind.

 

[devurus]

I've ordered one. I'm going to connect meth to it. Want to know how could I test my meth setup?

 

[Dumaurier7]

There is a new bench test feature.

 

[devurus]

There is a new bench test feature.

yeah already found in Tuner pro RT.

 

[Torgus]

I just emailed Jake. So...we shall see...my guess is the n54 is on the backburner as it does not account for a large amount of their ReFlex+ sales. Would not surprise me if we never see it. I hope I am wrong. Without the Can support it does not do much for me vs an AIC...

It seems they want to be a tuning company given all the ancillary products that have been removed from their website.

From my man Jake when I asked about Can Support/N54

"As for the integration - its got almost everything now. FF is built into the reflex. The full can integration however I am not sure of the date. We have had it ready since day 1 but MHD set up a list of priorities for dev on their end so I just am not sure when N54 will get it. I do know that it will only be on MSD81 ecus so you would need to upgrade to IJE0S / MSD81."

Who do we trust to upgrade my ECU now adays? It was on my list anyways because of the MOSFETs...

Time to spend more $$$ on an MSD81 and reflex plus + accessories

I swear this money pit never ends. Then I assume I will pop the motor

 

[RaspberryBoundless]

Has anyone ran into issues with the Reflex reading RPM from the crank signal, or the Boost Control not working?

I'm on another platform but this seems like the most active forum for discussion of the Reflex. I've recently fit it to my car and have tapped the crank sensor which is a hall effect sensor (60-2 teeth configuration) but it doesn't seem to read RPM above 1000rpm.

If I'm idling or below 1000 it's bang on accurate, if I go above 1000rpm it barely reaches around 1400 let alone 7000.

Another issue is that the control state for the boost control remains as "STARTING". I have all the PID values zero'd out and I'm just targeting fixed duty cycle. I've got the boost control flag enabled and I've got my aux mode set to boost control yet it doesn't output any duty cycle at all.

I feel bad for spamming Chris back and forth with the issues I'm running into so I was wondering if anybody else had experienced anything similar?

 

[shushikiary]

The 60-2 may be the problem, that or you ran a really long wire most likely. You might want to try the cam sensor instead and then count how many pulses it has per crank revolution and put that into the reflex so the rpm is accurate.

The PWM output for boost control is very much focused on the PID feed forward, so if your feed forward value isn't set right you'll get nothing out, basically you can't just zero out the PID values like that.

If you want to try a fixed output then you should use one of the PWM out tables for aux instead of setting it to boost control. I'd bet setting it to boost control sets it up to use the PID.

 

[RaspberryBoundless]

The 60-2 may be the problem, that or you ran a really long wire most likely. You might want to try the cam sensor instead and then count how many pulses it has per crank revolution and put that into the reflex so the rpm is accurate.

The PWM output for boost control is very much focused on the PID feed forward, so if your feed forward value isn't set right you'll get nothing out, basically you can't just zero out the PID values like that.

Yes it is fairly long - probably 2m or so as it's the complete opposite side of the engine bay. Chris said the 60-2 shouldn't be an issue - I'm baffled why it would read upto 1000 fine but not past that. I don't really have much of a better solution for the wiring.

I do have the cam sensor configured also, it's 3 teeth with one of the teeth being a "double" tooth. How would I go about configuring the reflex to read RPM from that instead - I don't see any option for setting the RPM source to that.

For boost control I was following the recommendation to zero out PID and attempt to get the base duty cycle table as close to the targets as possible before introducing PID - do I need to set feed forward even for this?

Thanks for the help.

 

[shushikiary]

From my experience on mine, the "base" table is all zero's and it relies on the feed forward and not a base table for the output. My understanding was that it does not use aux table when you set it in boost mode, but I could be wrong. When I setup mine (for N54 large single with a MAC valve on an external wastegate) all I had to adjust was the min/max range, the error and integral grains, and the feed forward - my AUX table is all 0's, and when asking Jake if I should adjust the aux table he said to leave it alone and only use the feed forward.

If he says the 60-2 is fine, then it's got to be the wiring. It's likely you have a bad connection or solder joint combined with the wire being too long or not shielded. Make the wire as short as you can, avoid running it near the alternator or the power cable from the alternator, make sure all the connectors are WELL connected and all solder joints are not "cold" solder joints or cracked. Last resort you could get a shielded cable. Make sure the grounds for everything are also well connected.

 

[RaspberryBoundless]

From my experience on mine, the "base" table is all zero's and it relies on the feed forward and not a base table for the output. My understanding was that it does not use aux table when you set it in boost mode, but I could be wrong. When I setup mine (for N54 large single with a MAC valve on an external wastegate) all I had to adjust was the min/max range, the error and integral grains, and the feed forward - my AUX table is all 0's, and when asking Jake if I should adjust the aux table he said to leave it alone and only use the feed forward.

If he says the 60-2 is fine, then it's got to be the wiring. It's likely you have a bad connection or solder joint combined with the wire being too long or not shielded. Make the wire as short as you can, avoid running it near the alternator or the power cable from the alternator, make sure all the connectors are WELL connected and all solder joints are not "cold" solder joints or cracked. Last resort you could get a shielded cable. Make sure the grounds for everything as also well connected.

I'm not touching the aux output tables myself, but rather the table with two rows for min/max ethanol vs rpm, with the values being the default WGDC/FF. My bad, I was forgetting that FF wasn't independent of that table itself.

I can try rewiring I suppose - I'm not using any joints but a single line pinned directly into the reflex which when goes to a positap in the engine harness.

I'll start with playing around with ground connection, it's currently grounded to a chassis ground point but I'll try some thicker gauge. If that doesn't work I'll try rerouting the crankshaft connection and also get some shielded cable on order.

 

[shushikiary]

The positap is likely your issue. They either work really well or give you a ton of issues. I'd pull that out and replace it with a good and proper solder joint and adhesive heat shrink.

 

[RaspberryBoundless]

The positap is likely your issue. They either work really well or give you a ton of issues. I'd pull that out and replace it with a good and proper solder joint and adhesive heat shrink.

This is just a temporary harness until the car goes to my engine builder and they whack up a proper one otherwise I'd be all for that.

I've got some better taps that I can give a try if I find them. I'm still baffled that it's accurate until 1k though.

 

[shushikiary]

If you have a high impedance connection it acts as a low pass filter, which flattens your edge rate. Given it's expecting a square wave, when your edge rate gets low enough you look like a sin wave, and as your frequency goes up and becomes a smaller and smaller sine wave centered around 1/2 the feed voltage of sensor (or there about), and thus there is no more "edge" to detect with a high enough or low enough threshold for the device to trigger off of.

High impedance like that can be because of really long wires, too thin of wires, poor connections, etc. Or if you're inducing a ton of noise from EMF (like your alternator or ignition coils) that can drown out the signal.

On the boost box design before I went to the reflex they had some serious grounding issues on that PCB. It was VERY susceptible to noise, and not very far from the ignition coils or their ground. The PCB had no ground plane and no decoupling caps for their TINY85 processor. This would cause the processor to go into reset when there was an EMF spike or a ground surge (from say the ignition coils that were less than 2 feet from it).

So my boost box was cutting out on me regularly. I took it apart and found the above, added some decoupling caps and put the thing in a well grounded faraday cage and it completely solved the issue. I gave the info on what I did to Jake, so if they want to make a rev 14 of the board they can and then that will likely eliminate the grounding issues the boost box had.

 

[RaspberryBoundless]

If you have a high impedance connection it acts as a low pass filter, which flattens your edge rate. Given it's expecting a square wave, when your edge rate gets low enough you look like a sin wave, and as your frequency goes up and becomes a smaller and smaller sine wave centered around 1/2 the feed voltage of sensor (or there about), and thus there is no more "edge" to detect with a high enough or low enough threshold for the device to trigger off of.

High impedance like that can be because of really long wires, too thin of wires, poor connections, etc. Or if you're inducing a ton of noise from EMF (like your alternator or ignition coils) that can drown out the signal.

On the boost box design before I went to the reflex they had some serious grounding issues on that PCB. It was VERY susceptible to noise, and not very far from the ignition coils or their ground. The PCB had no ground plane and no decoupling caps for their TINY85 processor. This would cause the processor to go into reset when there was an EMF spike or a ground surge (from say the ignition coils that were less than 2 feet from it).

So my boost box was cutting out on me regularly. I took it apart and found the above, added some decoupling caps and put the thing in a well grounded faraday cage and it completely solved the issue. I gave the info on what I did to Jake, so if they want to make a rev 14 of the board they can and then that will likely eliminate the grounding issues the boost box had.

Gotcha, that makes sense. I appreciate the help.

 

[RaspberryBoundless]

I just went and replaced the positap with one of my more solid splicing tools. From viewing the initial startup where the car revs to 1500 and back down to 600 it seems good. I also revved to around 2000 and it did follow but slightly off so changed the crank tooth count back from 58 to 60 what it originally was. Fingers crossed this was indeed the issue and I can apologise to Chris hah. I'll do a log on the road once traffic has cleared up.

BoostPID-ControlState still remains as "STARTING" and isn't outputting any duty cycle on the aux line. With cell tracing enabled it shows that the reflex is targeting the 30% DC I've specified in the WGDC/FF table (all cells are 30% for debugging) yet it still isn't activating the solenoid.

The solenoid state is OK-NoFail so it doesn't seem as though there's a wiring issue going on with that. When logging it shows the commanded duty cycle as 0 even though cell tracing shows 30 in the WGDC/FF table, so I'm baffled by that.

 

[shushikiary]

Likely it's still running it through the PID in some way and having the tables zero'ed out is making it output 0 after PID (like zero'ed out feed forward), that or it's not looking at that table because of the flags you have enabled.

 

[RaspberryBoundless]

Likely it's still running it through the PID in some way and having the tables zero'ed out is making it output 0 after PID (like zero'ed out feed forward), that or it's not looking at that table because of the flags you have enabled.

I can't imagine that's the case as it says aux output is FF + PID with FF being 30.

Aux type is set to 2 which is boost control and the boost control flag is set to 1 to enable it.

If the crank signal is now working correctly then I can try some very minor PID values to see if that fixes the issue.

 

[shushikiary]

If I remember correctly they may have also swapped the white and gray wires in some versions for which was aux 1 and which was aux 2, so you might try changing that to see what happens too.

 

[RaspberryBoundless]

If I remember correctly they may have also swapped the white and gray wires in some versions for which was aux 1 and which was aux 2, so you might try changing that to see what happens too.

Unfortunately the first thing I tried was configuring it as aux 2 rather than aux 1 which didn't resolve the issue either.

I reckon you're most likely right in it being an issue due to PID being zero'd out.. it doesn't make sense but it's the only logical reason I can think of.

 

[RaspberryBoundless]

It seems as though the new connector didn't work unfortunately. I've gone ahead and ordered a heatgun with a reflector and I'll use use some solder shrink tubes to do it tomorrow and hope that rectifies it.