Why VETuner costs £10
VETuner has been getting very little traction. It is a long way from covering its costs, so I thought I’d do a bit of promotion. I posted about it in a Speeduino group on Facebook.
I got a lot of comments and likes and even a couple of sign-ups! However, one comment made me pause.
I know it's only a tenner a year, but locking features that don't cost a penny to serve like tooth logger etc kind of adds a sour taste to the experience, I get it though for things like tune backups/storage/versioning etc
I started to write a response, but I deleted before posting as I wanted a bit more thinking time and room to lay out my case. I will be posting a link to this post back there.
Small wins
VETuner currently runs this sort of sequence
graph TD; A[Write To ECU] --> B[Wait]; B --> C[Read Data From ECU]; C --> D[Process ECU Data]; D --> A;
The Wait and Read steps account for 93% of the cycle time during which VETuner is twiddling it’s metaphorical thumbs. However this means we can do the processing bit for ‘free’
graph TD; A[Write To ECU] --> B[Process ECU Data from previous read]; B --> C[Wait]; C --> D[Read Data From ECU]; D --> A;
This strictly speaking means that the UI will lag one read behind reality, but as all the data is timestamped it will have no impact on logs or analysis and it has the benefit of about a 10% increase in the read rate because there is no pause between the read and the follow write.
The Cursed Floppy Drive Stick
Over the past month or so, I’ve resurrected my old Amiga 1200. I added a 2Gb SD card internally and set up a serial link to my PC.
I needed software, so I downloaded an archive of 1000(ish) Fred Fish disks. Fred Fish was someone who published floppy disks with curated pieces of software and they were a gold mine. I bought a few over my years at Uni, and the one with SB-Prolog got me through my second year resits.
‘Security’
Gah! Google!
I wrote some simple javascript code that a friend was interested in. It’s on my private Forgejo instance so I said “no worries, I’ll email it to you”
So I packaged it up as a tar.gz file and emailed it to his gmail email address.
Oh Noes! says Google! Hackers! Evil Code! Smuggling in compressed files! Your email shall be bounced!
That bounce then got treated as spam by Thunderbird and so I never saw it. It was only when I was about to flush my spam that I noticed it.
It Passed
I forgot to update that my car passed its MOT. Emissions still need some work, they could be better. However I have VETuner to help me out with that :)
CANBus on VETuner
VETuner now supports connecting to a second ECU over CANBus. Typically this is a Microsquirt running the Trans firmware to control an automatic gearbox. As I don’t have any of that hardware, development was somewhat problematic.
A very stoic user called Jochen put up with me pushing out builds for him to test and send me log files so I could rummage through the carnage. Ultimately, I wrote a simulator with enough fidelity to convince Tuner Studio that it was talking to a MS3/Trans combo, and then worked VETuner against that. This should put me in good stead for other odd comms options when they crop up in the future.
MOT Looms
MOT for The Stupid Car is booked for 11am on Wednesday. I better put the wheels back on it :)
To be continued……
Kindle, KOReader, Oh My!
I spent 14 years commuting into London and I read a lot of books. I had shelves of books that I basically read once and then put away. I bought a Kindle (around 2010 maybe) to cut down on the clutter.
I’ve ended up with many many books on it. Earlier Amazon announced that they were removing the ability to download copies of purchased books so I fired up Calibre, installed some plug ins, ran some scripts, and got them for posterity.
I Made A Thing
My family has a fascination with airliners. Living close to Luton airport a game has developed of trying to guess where an airliner is going. I had seen ESP32 Plane Radar and had bought a different circular display with an ESP32 on the back 3 years ago.
A bit of sleuthing to get the pins right and add the touch screen interface, and a bit of FreeCAD to print a base and protective cover (photo also shows one designed for side exit) and job was done. I surprised Kate with it yesterday, I can be a nice Dad sometimes :)
Pinch, punch
Small progress on the car. The cracks are all welded up, gussetted and painted. The bonnet frame and the radiator is in.
I started work on rewiring the fan, the start of the recent shenanigans and I came to remember how much I dislike un-insulated crimp connectors. I’m struggling to get a reliable crimp on the large diameter wire I’m using. I suspect I may have to resort to soldering.