ECUTalk v1.3 Released (Pocket PC/Laptop Consult Software)

thank BigCol for this update, he provided the necessary incentive to work on it over the last month

ECUTalk v1.3 Released - http://www.ecutalk.com

• Added ability to log sensors without showing them on gauges (when logging is enabled, checkboxes have a greyed out checkstate, indicated logging only)
• Logging changed so it logs all packets (only gauges will drop packets/not update when cpu is falling behind, but all packets will be logged)
• Colour setup for gauges added. Hard bit for you is coming up with a colour theme that looks ok!
• Added Instant Fuel Economy Sensor - requires RPM, Injector and Speed kph selected to work
• Changed DutyCycle/RH Sensors to calculate values from RPM and Injector/RH sensors (therefore requires them to be logged at least to work)
• Fixed Timestamps when milliseconds are less than 100 (3 digits). Previously they would not have leading zeroes
• Simplified gauges such that they will only display values within their range (however, logging will show the calculated value) and will no longer auto change their range to suit the values (as occasionally a weird value may be read which causes a unco gauge to be drawn).
• Added an option to allow the full-screen mode to only use the "working area" of the screen. Eg, it wont cover taskbar in a normal windows desktop, and for carpc users with special frontends, it may mean gauges display properly if running ECUTalk from within your frontend.
• Improved the saving of settings to .ini file. Note that the order of items in this .ini file matters - their names (what is shown before the ":") does not. Eg autoconnect, logging, selected sensors, working area option, injector size, gauge colours, etc are all stored in here.
• Removed EGT sensor (it's useless, only ever reads 4.98v)

See screenshots below to better understand difference between selecting sensors for gauges (batt, duty, econ, temp) which you check once, and for logging (rpm, injector, speed) which are checked a second time to make them grey. Also shown is how you can set the colour of the gauges yourself.



Some older screenshots

 

Awesome! Can't wait to get my car back now to try it!

 

Excellent job NewKleer, I have seen your handywork up close (D I F r32) and I was going
to get one of your 'Ecutalk Consult Lcd Displays' for my NA before I sold it.
Top quality and a very neat item and I'm sure, as I posted up on SAU thread, that
zed owners would want one, but this could be even better.

 

nah the lcd display is better (for daily driving at least), going from what i personally use in my car

it has a bit more potential to do other things also with consult due to it being hardware based (therefore quicker)

now the logging is fixed up though i can probably use it a bit more

 

Awesome that would have been a massive effort to create that software! At one stage I started writing something similar but then I went aftermarket ECU and lost interest in doing it.

Well done!!

 

Was the yellow / red warning threshold more difficult than you anticipated?

 

main thing is i havent been able to find a good way to set it up, ie to actually enter the thresholds into the program.

best i can think of is in one of the option tabs, have a dropdown of all the sensor names, and with each one you can either have no alarm, or one alarm, which is triggared when sensor value is either less than, or more than a given value. you would also set the background colour of the sensor when it falls into that region

but that would mean you could only have one threshold per sensor. having multiple makes it a bit harder to setup.

 

minor hiccup with v1.3, if its being used on a slow device, the gauges might lag behind the data (gauges arent dropping packets as they should).

will have a new version in next few days to fix that, and also give an option not to log every packet (which equates to around 10mb/hour), but every "x" packet (eg every second, every 10th, whatever) in other to be able to throttle that back if u wish

 

excellent,

Will test out on the car PC tomorrow

 

ECUTalk v1.3.2 Released - http://www.ecutalk.com

This version fixes a few bugs and has some pretty big performance improvements.
Users of v1.3 and v1.3.1 should update to this version.
v.1.3.1 added a MPG sensor for Imperial users (and an option to switch between Imperial/Metric sensors).

• Fixed issue in v1.3 and v1.3.1 which meant data packets weren't being dropped when CPU couldn't keep up
• Increased performance of gauge drawing by ~250% (on my PPC, time to draw a gauge went from ~30ms down to around ~12ms).
• Changed code to always draw gauges (even if data hasnt changed) in order to result in consistent amount of packets being logged per second.
• Added option to specify minimum gauge update speed - higher value means more packets are logged due to less gauge updates (and hence more time for logging). Eg on my 568 Jornada PocketPC 2002, 10ms = ~5 packets logged/second, whereas 1000ms = close to full 50 packets). The setting ignored when not logging (it will just update as quickly as possible).
• Improved consult streaming to allow more data to be read in and processed (rather than lost). Probably the best program for data logging due to the sheer amount of data able to be read in. On my desktop PC, setting minimum gauge refresh to 0ms (ie never skip a gauge redraw, hence uses most CPU), can log 35 packets/second of all sensors. Setting minimum refresh to just 50ms gives the full 50 packets/second. I compared this to Nissan Datascan, which can only log 16 packets/second on the same PC (and thats without gauges shown at all) with the same sensors.
• Changed options controls to dropdowns rather than textboxes (i didnt realise id disabled the use of the soft input panel on PPC, so you couldnt change settings). If you want to enter a value other than shown, edit the .ini file.
• Fixed logging time output, both to add in the missing leading zeros (eg it would show 7:5:7 for 7:05:07), and also added in a interpolated millisecond value for PPC users (which doesnt have a millisecond capability in standard time object).
• Minor changes to individual sensors to better display on gauges, and slight changes to change config (units shown next to sensor rather than down bottom as often the units would overlap gauge).
• Added a hidden option for CarPC users with frontends (eg Centrafuse) to manually edit .ini file to set custom top/bottom/left/right co-ordinates for full-screen mode. Example: FullScreenBounds_L|T|R|B:10|20|1000|900. Setting all to 0 will use default method.

 

I wanted to post up my thoughts

Firstly EXCELLENT display and logging software. I have been testing it on my Car PC
I love the instant economy gauge. I get 9-10 on the highway, which is about 28-30 mpg, not to shabby for a 17yo V6. So m y estimations of 700km per tank is about right.

Anything I say below is merely for suggestion purposes, it is not meant to be derogatory in any way.

I find that sometimes when I start the software, that it forgets some of the gauges that were open on the previous execution. If I then shut down the program and restart it then remembers the original configuration.

It really chews up CPU time, particularly if it is the active window. If you make it a background window, CPU time is halved.

I would love to see the digital readout at the bottom of each gauge to either be larger or Bold or an option of end user input on font size and weight. It can be hard to see the values if you only have time for a quick glance at the screen.

All in all very usable software, and very nicely done.

 

700km per tank???

 

is this the checkboxes arent showing up, or the checks inside them to select it arent?

I should probably put an option in next revision as to a ms sleep period between each data read (which essentially would lower cpu usage). older versions of ecutalk had an automatically adjusting one, but sometimes this resulted in sleeping for too long and then having to drop packets.

ive tried to get it to auto increase size depending on size of gauge, but i havent got this working quite right yet to scale better

 

Hi

Yeah, when the program decides to not remember the gauges, only the first two rows or so of checkboxes display in the window b4 the gauges are displayed. It's probably about 1 in 10 starts so no real biggie, just thought I'd mention it.

 

My fuel economy is really good

I often get 400 k per tank around the town though (driving style i am afraid), but on the highway it's very good.
I also notice that the most economical driving speed is about 85 kmph.
I guess the unichip is paying for itself. I particularly asked them to pay attention to cruising fuel economy when they did the tune.

 

do u remember if the progressbar keeps incrementing (as if its checking sensors, but not adding them?)

i have had another user say occasionally the sensors dont show up...i think i changed the sensor detection slightly in this version, but i dont see why it wouldnt work...

anyway sometime in future ill be doing a quicker gauge test on startup (rather than doing each individually, i can do a whole batch until one isnt supported)

thanks for the feedback

 

Not actually sure

I'll look out for that next time and let you know.

 

Hi Pete,

I just got my car back and have given this a bit of a run over the past week. Firstly, there has been heaps of good work that has gone into this - congrats to you

However I have encountered an issue where I start my car, and drive for a bit and sometimes after 10-15 minutes the gauges just stop displaying. Currently I am just displaying Batt & Water Temp. If I touch the screen and go back to the gauge selection screen, then click on display gauges, it works again pretty much for ages.

The issue does not appear to always occur, and it occurs regardless of whether I am logging only the displayed sensors or a lot of sensors. I can't seem to pinpoint the exact issue at this stage as it appears to be random. Just though I'd let you know, and I'll be in contact if I am able to reproduce the issue consistently.

Other than that there are some nice touches!

 

Maybe create a tab with the following info:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Sensor (Drop Down Box)]

Threshold 1 (value box)
Threshold 1 Alarm On (check box)
Threshold 1 Alarm Sound (Drop Down box / navigate to local wavs etc)
Threshold 1 Gauage Colour (Drop Down Box)

Threshold 2 (value box)
Threshold 2 Alarm On (check box)
Threshold 2 Alarm Sound (Drop Down box / navigate to local wavs etc)
Threshold 2 Gauage Colour (Drop Down Box)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

any chance ur consult interface has send/received leds? if so are they on/off once its hung?

if the clicking pulls it out from gauge screen, then it hasnt hung on anything, ie its processing the main loop which is:
1) determine num of bytes to read from serial port
2) read bytes
3) if any bytes were read, update sensor values (ie gauges)
4) adjust for load (accounts for slower devices)
5) back to 1) unless we have clicked gauge/pressed escape

but in step 3, if the data is not in correct order (ie some data has been skipped somewhere) then it may be possible for it to not be interpreted right and sensor updating might be skipped altogether.

the other possibility is no bytes were read each time (ie either the pda isnt receiving any more data, or the ecu isnt sending anymore, though the former doesnt not imply the latter necessarily)

next update (which may be a while away) i want to hopefully get it to drop out of gauges mode and go back to reconnecting if it isnt reading any data (and hence u never have to actually touch the program once its started, ie when u turn ur car back on itll reconnect itself).

and your idea for alerts looks fine (need to specify whether a match needs to have higher or lower value than supplied value though).

would it be sufficient to have a given colour for all "threshold 1" and 2, ie not specific to sensor. ie if u set up threshold 1 for multiple sensors, they would all use same backcolour if met, which would make it easier:

---------------
Threshold 1 Gauage Colour (Drop Down Box)
Threshold 1 Alarm Sound (Drop Down box / navigate to local wavs etc)

Threshold 2 Gauage Colour (Drop Down Box)
Threshold 2 Alarm Sound (Drop Down box / navigate to local wavs etc)

"Threshold 2 will take precedence if sensor value meets both thresholds"

[Sensor (Drop Down Box)]

Threshold 1 Alarm On (check box)
Threshold 1 (value box) [less than/greater than]

Threshold 2 Alarm On (check box)
Threshold 2 (value box) [less than/greater than]
---------------