greenamex2,
Most ECU manufacturers are not geared up to supporting end users directly, it is a highly ineffective use of a very skilled workforce; either that or you need to set on more staff to deal with the end users to free up the engineers to do what they do best, which is something that most ECU manufacturers won't do because either they cater for end users through their distribution / retail channels or they just don't deal with Joe Public, period.
At the moment Solaris are taking a bit of a hybrid approach, we try to support end users as well as the retailers, but as the customer base grows this will inevitably become impractical and it will be necessary to fall back to the channel approach; by that time the retailers will have had enough experience to be able to answer all bar a minute number of the end user questions, while we will concentrate on supporting the retailers and dealing with things that are outside their scope of expertise.
Ryan is very fair and I'm sure he'll provide you with a competitive quote
The software UI is indeed designed for mappers / engine developers, not end users, that is quite intentional. The product is very powerful and very flexible, it would be foolish in the extreme to "dumb it down" to make it more accessible to typical end users. None of the software was ever, or ever will be DOS or DOS related. The applications are Windows apps and work correctly; I've had SView running at 2560x1600, you can't do that with a DOS program. Windows can be maximised, minimised, moved, obscured etc. It may not follow the Windows paradigm / feel but that too is intentional. Windows and mapping just don't go together, they're two different paradigms, trying to mix the two is just messy, and mess is one thing you can really do without when you could expire an engine in a matter of seconds. It needs to be clear and unambiguous. It needs to be repeatable and predictable. The last thing you need to have is 20 open windows and trying to find the one that's of interest! Until Microsoft come up with a way of making mapping software using native Windows paradigms viable, it's not an option we intend to pursue.
The Japanese orientation is simply a reflection of the retailer we have at present, but it is also a reflection of the tuning market in general, there is a lot of jap stuff out there and the owners like to tune. That's not to say we're not interested in the European manufacturers, we just decided to start with what we, and our retailers know; there's nothing worse than being unprepared! It will happen in due course, but for now the main focus is on Japanese cars, and special projects. There is no real N/A / forced induction bias from our perspective, again it is more a reflection of the market and who is tuning what.... if everyone we knew was tuning N/A cars then there would be more N/A exposure, but most seem to opt for forced induction. That may simply be the expression of the realisation that it is far far more difficult to get sizeable gains out of an N/A engine than it is to do so out of a forced induction engine; bolt on a bigger turbo, injectors, uprate the fuel pump and sort out the management and you really can double the power output of a turbo engine, but woe betides the man that tries for a gain of that magnitude from an N/A engine! (Or at least an empty wallet).
As regards the question of whether it is worth going fully sequential, the answer is unequivocally yes. From a fuelling point of view, splitting your fuel delivery up into more than one pulse per cycle brings about a whole manner of issues. To start with there is injector lag time, it takes time for the injector to open and start flowing fuel. It also takes time for it to close. There is also inertia in the moving part(s). Immediately there are a few variables and inconsistencies. The time it takes to open is not 100% repeatable, there are cycle to cycle variations... double the number of cycles and you double those variations. Next we have fuel flow linearity at low pulse widths. Due to inertia you can find that at low pulse widths, increasing the duration slightly actually reduces delivery! Two short pulses will misbehave more badly that one slightly longer one. The next question you need to answer is whether you want the injector to close between the two pulses per delivery; that will immediately double the wasted time, and therefore time unavailable for injection... say it takes 1ms to open and you're at 6000RPM, then you'de have two lots of 9ms to play with in batch fire but 19ms worth in sequential. There is also nonlinearity at high duty cycles, and inertial effects to consider; holding an injector open for 9ms, closing it and immediately opening it again, it may well open more rapidly than expected as the pintle just bounces back as the current is reapplied, gains even more inertia and bounces off the other extreme of its travel causing yet more nonlinearity. Then you need to consider the effect on the fuel pressure regulation. The fuel pressure regulator maintains the pressure by returning excess fuel, if two or more injectors open simultaneously the perturbation to the fuel pressure will be greater, as will the time for it to recover / stabilise, so not only is there yet more nonlinearity due to the pressure perturbations, but they're also happening twice as often! With a sequential system it is true that pulses can and do overlap, and that a pressure fluctuation caused by one injector just opening will affect another that's already injecting, but it is equally true that such overlaps and an do happen in batch fire, where the perturbation will be even greater. There is also an increase in the heat dissipation in the power transistors driving the injectors; transistors dissipate most of the heat during the switching transitions. If we look at the ignition side of things, wasted spark is, as the name rightly points out, wasteful. Firing a spark during the exhaust stroke is just a waste of energy! Beyond that, having only half the amount of time available to charge the coils means less time to build up a magnetic field, ergo less spark energy if the coils take a while to reach saturation; this is one reason some of the competitors' ECUs cannot charge the coils on the Toyota 2JZ engine adequately and misfires start happening as the boost is cranked up. Of course spark plug life is also reduced by the excess sparks, but that's not really a consideration on a race engine. Like the fuel injectors, the transistors driving the coils will also end up dissipating more power.
On the plus side, with our ECUs you have the choice. We can simply choose not to go fully sequential and you can try driving the car that way, and also fully sequential, experience the difference for yourself
Cruise and high vacuum areas tend to become more "lumpy" but the difference will probably be less noticeable at higher manifold pressures (well, until you get high enough you can't drive a spark through the gap any more, but that's rather less likely to happen on an N/A than a forced induction engine).
Hope this helps,
Pat.
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