I specifically said you could do it. I just wouldn’t do it.
The downside isn’t bells/whistles, it’s reliability. It’s an open source setup with known issues and cheap hardware. As a shop, the things we put out for our customers need to work properly. I like to test all sorts of things on my own cars but I still wouldn’t even consider putting one on my car.
We’d wire an Autronic SM4 in for this project, same as on my car.
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Megasquirt now has available its new surface mount board so no more so called “cheap hardware”. Also this so called “cheap hardware” is only as good as its installer/builder. Obviously if youve never touched a soldering iron before in your life MS probably isnt something youd wanna build yourself.
Theres all sorts of great options out there that will work great and run a subaru, but i guess it depends on how many thousands$$$ you wanna spend. mean while a complete MS setup which can be used as a piggy back for fuel, or timing , or complete standalone all for under 500bucs.
Once we sort out AVCS control the Autronic will be better all around. I just haven’t had time to play with it, but they have it working on the JDM STi and it should work fine if I just wire it up.
The software makes tuning take half the time the Hydra takes. In a Hydra you have to edit cells by predetermined values up and down ONLY so fuel tuning is a huge PITA. You can only add/subtract say .05ms at a time. There’s no multiply function and no option to add/subtract a user supplied value.
Autronic has more stable hardware than anything out there I’ve seen which means a lot to me. I’ve seen far too many other big name standalones go bad.
If you’re wiring it in anyways, Autronic all the way. For most WRX/STi owners it doesn’t make sense when they can plug in an AEM or Hydra EMS and I wouldn’t push an Autronic on people in that boat unless it was a race car and I felt they could use Autronic’s vastly better antilag functionality, etc.
The downside isn’t bells/whistles, it’s reliability. It’s an open source setup with known issues and cheap hardware.
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A properly built megasquirt is very reliable. I know people who have been running the early v 1.0 for years without an issue. What you call cheap hardware I call inexpensive. What issues are you talking about??
I used my megasquirt, setup by myself and friends, tuned by myself and friends (with no knock sensor mind you), and I did just fine with it. It has TONS of neat things like mentioned above, launch control, antilag, etc… It does REALLY cool stuff too, like pulling timing based on coolant temps as a safety precaution, etc…
I would say that the board itself is no lower quality then any other standalone, its in a sealed metal case, with a DB37 connector going to it. If properly installed, it should be just as safe as any standalone.
As for the open source nature of it, it has the benefits and downsides as any other open source project. It may not have the big name backing as AEM and others do, but you are able to get updates on a daily basis, if you need something. You would never get that kind of support from someone like AEM. When I started to run my 83# injectors, I needed more resolution. Other people were having this same problem, so a few people got together and perfected the high resolution code. I was then able to idle my injectors no problem, and run a perfect 12:1 afr at redline.
Can you do it, absolutely. You can megasquirt your frekin gocart if you wanted too. Would I? No. Its cheap, 500 bucks often gets you everything you need, including wiring and sensors. It was the perfect solution for me, since no one made other standalones for 95 neons. But, they do make them for the subaru platform, and even if you have to do extra wiring, it would be benefitial to use that setup, I feel.