Yesterday Tracy took pity on me and came down and did some troubleshooting.

At first listen he said it sounded like I was only running on one rotor. We ruled that out by disconnecting power to rotor 1 coils, then rotor 2 coils. Engine didn't stop.

Tracy said it sounded like timing was way late - not the sharp pop he'd expect from the rotary exhaust. (I would never have heard that).

Rechecked CAS wiring - OK.

Found and marked TDC on starter ring gear with white paint in between two teeth, and put on a timing light. Timing was off and random to the point he only got a glimpse of the mark once.

He thought he heard it run right once at very low RPM when I pulled back on throttle to shut down.

I removed the EC3 and he took it home. He confirmed that at very low idle RPMs it works right (timing is calculated differently there) but at higher RPMs coils never got the signal to fire! Only reason they fired at all is safety built into coils (and EC3) that fires themselves after max allowed dwell time.

He gave me a couple of hardware changes to make: clamping circuit on CAS input and shorting a diode from A supply to the Vcc3 supply. Doubtful that they will handle my issue.

So now it's up to me to debug the program. We verified the essential configuration bits. He lent me an Arduino based RX-8 CAS simulator (I'll post info on how to make your own later.)

The lazy person's (me) way to find out what changed is to compare the source code from when it last worked (for a Renesis) and the current source code.

If anyone has a copy of the EC3CL8.ASM file from several years ago, I would appreciate it.

However, it's probably not a bad idea to have someone other than Tracy who's also familiar with the EC3 program. So I might as well dig in.

I'll keep you briefed on what we find.

Finn