Tracy retired for real some years ago.
He made all the PSRU specs and EC/EM programming public domain.
He's been tinkering with SpeedUnio, but nothing serious.
I got an EC3 board from him and sort of figured I would learn the
program and maybe be able to provide some support for it. Turns
out to be tougher and time consuming than I thought. I'm not
really a motor head like Tracy. He can listen to an engine running
and pretty much diagnose what's going on.
Tracy's thinking that getting some of the SpeedUnio boards and
TunerStudio would be a lot easier for someone to work with. Yeah,
one would have to add some relays to switch between the boards (if
want redundancy) and add mixture tuning to the SppedUnio software.
The EC3 is just more convenient (if programmed correctly).
RV-8 repairs were almost complete last time he was in Colorado but
Van's had sent the wrong skin. By the time he got the right one it
was time to head back to Shady Bend.
Finn
On 6/13/2020 2:10 AM, Todd Bartrim
bartrim@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Finn;?? I'm sorry I can't help you with the code,
but how is Tracy? He's been off-line since after his RV8
accident but I'm quite curious how that rebuild is going.
I'll always regret never making it down to the Rotary
Roundup at Shady Bend. I always figured there was always next
year. Until there wasn't. So I think once this whole current
mess is behind us I'm going to make every effort to make it
down to the fly-in at Slobovia Outernational and meet a few
other rotorheads, to see what they're doing.
?? But tell Tracy that his presence??on the list is missed
and we'd appreciate some updates on his rebuild, even if they
are not yet rotary related. Any plane that is powered by a
rotary is of interest to me even if he's still doing airframe
repairs.
Todd Bartrim
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
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