Pro Flow (same topic different question)
04-24-2002, 03:18 PM
#1
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Pro Flow (same topic different question)
SO far I am very happy with modernperformance. I lost the wiring schimatic so I called up Nick. He looked up my model and told me which of the 5 wires goes where very quickly. It's pretty simple, so far. I just need to know (WHERE IS THE BEST PLACE TO PICK UP A BATTERY GROUND ?????)
BTW this unit is almost TOO big. It barely fits!!! (its' 75 mm) It wasn't too difficult getting her in there, and it looks very nice (pics soon). But it rubs and is obviously cramped.
I had a short discussion with Nick. This unit does not have to be re calibrated after changes. You can run up to a 52lbs injector without having calibration problems. If you need anything larger than a 52 lb injector, you'll be wanting DFI anyway.
car will be started today, and if it doesn't **** water (I put a little crack in the coolant adapter plate on top of the head
) I will have pics very soon.
The turbo went in beautifully, that was one of the easiest things thus far.
I have a new adapter plate on the way
...I'ma gonna need me some tires
BTW this unit is almost TOO big. It barely fits!!! (its' 75 mm) It wasn't too difficult getting her in there, and it looks very nice (pics soon). But it rubs and is obviously cramped.
I had a short discussion with Nick. This unit does not have to be re calibrated after changes. You can run up to a 52lbs injector without having calibration problems. If you need anything larger than a 52 lb injector, you'll be wanting DFI anyway.
car will be started today, and if it doesn't **** water (I put a little crack in the coolant adapter plate on top of the head
) I will have pics very soon. The turbo went in beautifully, that was one of the easiest things thus far.
I have a new adapter plate on the way
...I'ma gonna need me some tires
04-24-2002, 04:44 PM
#3
Nordschleife Master
i always forget.
look at the battery, see which terminal has a wire going to the chasis...thats your ground.
I believe negatives ground...but double check with above method.
look at the battery, see which terminal has a wire going to the chasis...thats your ground.
I believe negatives ground...but double check with above method.
04-24-2002, 08:30 PM
#6
Nordschleife Master
Thread Starter
I need a "battery ground" and a "12V key on". What would be the best place to pick up these leads???
Would a "battery ground" have to come directly off the terminal?
I will be mounting the fuel controller where the windshield washer res. used to be, so if there is any wires, like off the coil for example?? <img src="confused.gif" border="0">
Would a "battery ground" have to come directly off the terminal?
I will be mounting the fuel controller where the windshield washer res. used to be, so if there is any wires, like off the coil for example?? <img src="confused.gif" border="0">
04-24-2002, 11:14 PM
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Be careful. "Battery ground" goes back to the negative terminal of the battery. This is different from "earth ground", although I'm not sure what the term for earth ground is in automobiles. Basically the earth ground is connected to the body.
The reason they are different is that there is nothing saying that the negative terminal of the battery has to be at any specific voltage. When you say that a car battery is 12V all you are saying is that the difference between the positive and negative terminals is 12V. The actual volts of the terminals might be 5V and 17V. Now in reality the negative terminal is going to be much closer to 0V, but it is still important to use the right one because even if the voltage jumps around some the difference between the positive and negative terminals is still pretty much the same. The earth ground on the other hand is always about the closest to 0V you will find on a car. If voltages start jumping around using the wrong ground could result in too much or even too little voltage, causing intermitten failures or even burning out components.
And now that we have thoroughly discussed batteries and voltages let us never speak of this again.
As far as which wire to use, you need a chart or a voltmeter. Trusting which one to use because of blind faith in color coding is risky business.
Multimeters are a good thing to have anyway.
The reason they are different is that there is nothing saying that the negative terminal of the battery has to be at any specific voltage. When you say that a car battery is 12V all you are saying is that the difference between the positive and negative terminals is 12V. The actual volts of the terminals might be 5V and 17V. Now in reality the negative terminal is going to be much closer to 0V, but it is still important to use the right one because even if the voltage jumps around some the difference between the positive and negative terminals is still pretty much the same. The earth ground on the other hand is always about the closest to 0V you will find on a car. If voltages start jumping around using the wrong ground could result in too much or even too little voltage, causing intermitten failures or even burning out components.
And now that we have thoroughly discussed batteries and voltages let us never speak of this again.
As far as which wire to use, you need a chart or a voltmeter. Trusting which one to use because of blind faith in color coding is risky business.
Multimeters are a good thing to have anyway.
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04-25-2002, 01:26 AM
#9
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Luke,
You can basically take a ground from anything metal in the car. There are common grounding points in a few areas of the car.One is on the block.One is in the battery compartment near the battery.Two are located next to each headlight. There is also one under the drivers side of the dash, in the rear cargo area and I am sure there are a couple places I forgot.
About mass-air sensors and big injectors...... Unless you have some type of controller or chip, that will modify the injctor pulsewidth, you will not be able to run bigger injectors. The reason is that the pulsewidth value on the maps in the chips will still be the same. The only difference is that you will have a 52 lb/hr (30% larger) injector that is open the same amount of time that the 37 lb/hr injectors should be. Your car will be way to rich. This is why we sell the ARC2.It has the ability to adjust the injector pulsewidth without the need for a custom burnt chip or without a sensor adjustment.
You can basically take a ground from anything metal in the car. There are common grounding points in a few areas of the car.One is on the block.One is in the battery compartment near the battery.Two are located next to each headlight. There is also one under the drivers side of the dash, in the rear cargo area and I am sure there are a couple places I forgot.
About mass-air sensors and big injectors...... Unless you have some type of controller or chip, that will modify the injctor pulsewidth, you will not be able to run bigger injectors. The reason is that the pulsewidth value on the maps in the chips will still be the same. The only difference is that you will have a 52 lb/hr (30% larger) injector that is open the same amount of time that the 37 lb/hr injectors should be. Your car will be way to rich. This is why we sell the ARC2.It has the ability to adjust the injector pulsewidth without the need for a custom burnt chip or without a sensor adjustment.
04-25-2002, 10:59 AM
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Luke,
You can ground to anything metal on the car, and this will work 99.9% of the time. The negative terminal of the battery is tied to a chasis ground point as well, so that when everything is working it doesn't matter. If the instructions say to tie to a "battery ground" they don't mean chasis ground and you shouldn't do it, even if it works and tons of people do it and never have, and in all likelyhood never WILL have a problem.
The reason is that if the connection of the negative terminal of the battery to chassis ground ever gets disconnected (can you say acid?) you suddenly have a floating ground on the negative terminal of the battery. If you tied into the "battery ground" your sensitive electronics are going to be okay. If you tied into the chasis ground your likely to experience intermitten failures that are impossible to track down. Ever heard people complain of electrical gremlins that come and go? What's worse you could damage electrical components in this way.
Just my .02
You can ground to anything metal on the car, and this will work 99.9% of the time. The negative terminal of the battery is tied to a chasis ground point as well, so that when everything is working it doesn't matter. If the instructions say to tie to a "battery ground" they don't mean chasis ground and you shouldn't do it, even if it works and tons of people do it and never have, and in all likelyhood never WILL have a problem.
The reason is that if the connection of the negative terminal of the battery to chassis ground ever gets disconnected (can you say acid?) you suddenly have a floating ground on the negative terminal of the battery. If you tied into the "battery ground" your sensitive electronics are going to be okay. If you tied into the chasis ground your likely to experience intermitten failures that are impossible to track down. Ever heard people complain of electrical gremlins that come and go? What's worse you could damage electrical components in this way.
Just my .02
04-25-2002, 01:46 PM
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alright, this could get grisly (or fantastically boring) as another EE enters the fray...
measuring voltage is like measuring altitude. everything you can measure is relative to something else, there isn't really "absolute" voltage or height. and so just as we define sea level as the universal zero for measuring altitude, we define the electric potential of the earth as zero volts. hence the term "earth ground", which is used to describe circuits in which one particular part (usually the negative size of a power supply) is tied to some underground metal plumbing or a rod hammered in the ground, or that 3rd round plug in an AC power outlet. this term has no place in discussion of automotive electronics as a car is electrically isolated from the earth at all times.
so in a car, they do the next best thing... define the entire chassis as ground. now for the "battery" ground vs "chassis" ground. there is a subtle difference here, but in the majority of car wiring it is an insignifigant one. I am going to agree with jonathan here in that bad grounds are the cause of nearly every problem in which the car seems posessed by a poltergeist... however, i do not beleive that this is reason to tie all kinds of stuff straight back to the battery instead of grouding it to the chassis. you end up with a nasty tangle of wires and a solution that is probably less reliable than just a good sturdy bolt to the frame. why would 10 feet of wire snaking around a million possible things that could melt it or cut it be more reliable than a good sturdy bolt to the closest solid peice of metal?
so for anything that is just receiving POWER from the battery, go ahead and ground it to the nearest peice of solid metal. but now that i've said all that, there is a case in which this might cause problems. A car is just a big peice of steel, which has a finite resistance, as do connections involving bolts and crimp lugs. and those of you who know ohms law (should be all of you if you passed high school physics) know that flowing a current through a resistance gives you a voltage.... what does this mean? that any arbitrary piece of metal in the car could be a few millovolts above or below some other piece. does this matter for powering something that is made to work on any voltage between 11 and 16? hell no! turning on your headlights changes your system voltage by way more than this. so when does it matter? when you are sending information via a voltage signal.
example: assume you have an ill new "pro flow" MAF, it reads air flow, and generates a voltage signal to output by driving its output wire to some voltage above the potential of its ground wire. this signal voltage then goes to the ECU (whoops i mean DME for a porsche, PCM for a general motors, or ECM for a mazda) which reads it, probably via an analog to digital convertor, which generates some bits at its output based on (important part coming up) the difference between the voltage at the signal input and the ground input! so if you look back to what i said about millivolt differences between grounds, you will see the potential probelm. the maf could be trying to generate a signal of .569 volts, but if its ground is .083 volts higher than the ecu ground, then the ecu will read .652 volts. in a low voltage signal, a few millivolts can make a lot of difference.
moral of the story? anything that is using ground as a reference for generating a signal should not be grounded at the same point as something that uses a lot of power (flows a lot of current into ground). IE, don't ground your MAF on one of the headlight ground points. I don't have my schematics handy, but my experience with the engine wiring i've done (lots) is that there is usually a signal ground wire coming from the ecu and going to every sensor in the engine to assure that any voltages generated as a signal will all be referenced to a common zero with the ecu. if you have schematics, try to find this wire. if you don't, let me know and i'll dig mine up tonight and check for you.
power ground is always brown on a porsche (black on everythign else). the signal ground i was just talking about is probably a different color.
ahhhh clear as mud, right?
ok jonathan, your turn, lets see how many people we can scare away from this thread!
measuring voltage is like measuring altitude. everything you can measure is relative to something else, there isn't really "absolute" voltage or height. and so just as we define sea level as the universal zero for measuring altitude, we define the electric potential of the earth as zero volts. hence the term "earth ground", which is used to describe circuits in which one particular part (usually the negative size of a power supply) is tied to some underground metal plumbing or a rod hammered in the ground, or that 3rd round plug in an AC power outlet. this term has no place in discussion of automotive electronics as a car is electrically isolated from the earth at all times.
so in a car, they do the next best thing... define the entire chassis as ground. now for the "battery" ground vs "chassis" ground. there is a subtle difference here, but in the majority of car wiring it is an insignifigant one. I am going to agree with jonathan here in that bad grounds are the cause of nearly every problem in which the car seems posessed by a poltergeist... however, i do not beleive that this is reason to tie all kinds of stuff straight back to the battery instead of grouding it to the chassis. you end up with a nasty tangle of wires and a solution that is probably less reliable than just a good sturdy bolt to the frame. why would 10 feet of wire snaking around a million possible things that could melt it or cut it be more reliable than a good sturdy bolt to the closest solid peice of metal?
so for anything that is just receiving POWER from the battery, go ahead and ground it to the nearest peice of solid metal. but now that i've said all that, there is a case in which this might cause problems. A car is just a big peice of steel, which has a finite resistance, as do connections involving bolts and crimp lugs. and those of you who know ohms law (should be all of you if you passed high school physics) know that flowing a current through a resistance gives you a voltage.... what does this mean? that any arbitrary piece of metal in the car could be a few millovolts above or below some other piece. does this matter for powering something that is made to work on any voltage between 11 and 16? hell no! turning on your headlights changes your system voltage by way more than this. so when does it matter? when you are sending information via a voltage signal.
example: assume you have an ill new "pro flow" MAF, it reads air flow, and generates a voltage signal to output by driving its output wire to some voltage above the potential of its ground wire. this signal voltage then goes to the ECU (whoops i mean DME for a porsche, PCM for a general motors, or ECM for a mazda) which reads it, probably via an analog to digital convertor, which generates some bits at its output based on (important part coming up) the difference between the voltage at the signal input and the ground input! so if you look back to what i said about millivolt differences between grounds, you will see the potential probelm. the maf could be trying to generate a signal of .569 volts, but if its ground is .083 volts higher than the ecu ground, then the ecu will read .652 volts. in a low voltage signal, a few millivolts can make a lot of difference.
moral of the story? anything that is using ground as a reference for generating a signal should not be grounded at the same point as something that uses a lot of power (flows a lot of current into ground). IE, don't ground your MAF on one of the headlight ground points. I don't have my schematics handy, but my experience with the engine wiring i've done (lots) is that there is usually a signal ground wire coming from the ecu and going to every sensor in the engine to assure that any voltages generated as a signal will all be referenced to a common zero with the ecu. if you have schematics, try to find this wire. if you don't, let me know and i'll dig mine up tonight and check for you.
power ground is always brown on a porsche (black on everythign else). the signal ground i was just talking about is probably a different color.
ahhhh clear as mud, right?
ok jonathan, your turn, lets see how many people we can scare away from this thread!
04-25-2002, 02:24 PM
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I'll have to agree completely with that, bs. I was not trying to suggest that chasis ground was wrong for all cases. I was just trying to give advice to Luke's particular case involving a sensor. The common ground for all sensors that the ECU/DME/(insert stupid acronym for embedded computer here) provides is most likely what the term "battery ground" refers to. I also wasn't intending to suggest people run their own wire back to the battery, just that they find the right one.
Now that I think about it you might be able to tie into the Oil Sending unit's ground if that's the area I'm thinking about. Its right below the oil filter.
As to my background, I'm a EE/Computer Engineer and my specialty is more in embedded realtime systems. I'm just starting to get into automotive as a hobby. Although I'm dying to make my own ECU...
Just to scare you more about grounds, it would probably be much worse to hook a high power piece of equipment up to the ECU ground instead of the chassis compared to hooking up a sensor to the wrong ground. Hook up a sensor to chassis ground the sensor is going to be off. Hook up your headlights to ECU ground and your car might die when you switch to high beams.
Really there is nothing much to worry about with the whole grounding thing, but there is a difference.
I tell you, be careful about posting tech topics. Those pesky engineers can go on forever. Quick! Someone ask a question about how transmissions work. Maybe we've got some ME's reading!
Cheers...
Now that I think about it you might be able to tie into the Oil Sending unit's ground if that's the area I'm thinking about. Its right below the oil filter.
As to my background, I'm a EE/Computer Engineer and my specialty is more in embedded realtime systems. I'm just starting to get into automotive as a hobby. Although I'm dying to make my own ECU...
Just to scare you more about grounds, it would probably be much worse to hook a high power piece of equipment up to the ECU ground instead of the chassis compared to hooking up a sensor to the wrong ground. Hook up a sensor to chassis ground the sensor is going to be off. Hook up your headlights to ECU ground and your car might die when you switch to high beams.
Really there is nothing much to worry about with the whole grounding thing, but there is a difference.
I tell you, be careful about posting tech topics. Those pesky engineers can go on forever. Quick! Someone ask a question about how transmissions work. Maybe we've got some ME's reading!
Cheers...
04-25-2002, 02:34 PM
#13
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[quote]Originally posted by TurboTim:
<strong>Luke,
About mass-air sensors and big injectors...... Unless you have some type of controller or chip, that will modify the injctor pulsewidth, you will not be able to run bigger injectors. The reason is that the pulsewidth value on the maps in the chips will still be the same. The only difference is that you will have a 52 lb/hr (30% larger) injector that is open the same amount of time that the 37 lb/hr injectors should be. Your car will be way to rich. This is why we sell the ARC2.It has the ability to adjust the injector pulsewidth without the need for a custom burnt chip or without a sensor adjustment.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I understand this and asked similar questions. Tis PRO M unit is modified and comes with a fuel controller that , in conjuction with manipulating Duty cycles on motronic systems, you can easily run upto a 52lbs injector.
I personally am a little skepticall. I bought one of your small turbos because I am not looking for big power and probably will only run 1 bar, BUT I might just have to pick up a set of 47lbs'ers just to see if I really can still dial this thing in. Nick of Modernperformance sounds really familular with Bosch injectors and he knows his system. It seems to work under many other applications? I am curious and should know the answer to my questions in about (1 day)
Where is a good place to pick up a 12 volt key on lead?
<img src="confused.gif" border="0">
<strong>Luke,
About mass-air sensors and big injectors...... Unless you have some type of controller or chip, that will modify the injctor pulsewidth, you will not be able to run bigger injectors. The reason is that the pulsewidth value on the maps in the chips will still be the same. The only difference is that you will have a 52 lb/hr (30% larger) injector that is open the same amount of time that the 37 lb/hr injectors should be. Your car will be way to rich. This is why we sell the ARC2.It has the ability to adjust the injector pulsewidth without the need for a custom burnt chip or without a sensor adjustment.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I understand this and asked similar questions. Tis PRO M unit is modified and comes with a fuel controller that , in conjuction with manipulating Duty cycles on motronic systems, you can easily run upto a 52lbs injector.
I personally am a little skepticall. I bought one of your small turbos because I am not looking for big power and probably will only run 1 bar, BUT I might just have to pick up a set of 47lbs'ers just to see if I really can still dial this thing in. Nick of Modernperformance sounds really familular with Bosch injectors and he knows his system. It seems to work under many other applications? I am curious and should know the answer to my questions in about (1 day)
Where is a good place to pick up a 12 volt key on lead?
<img src="confused.gif" border="0">
04-25-2002, 02:38 PM
#14
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Thread Starter
[quote]Originally posted by bs:
<strong>(should be all of you if you passed high school physics) </strong><hr></blockquote>
I have 3 and a half weeks left [quote]Originally posted by Jonathan Martini:
<strong> Maybe we've got some ME's reading!
Cheers...</strong><hr></blockquote>
I am an incoming freshman at Kettering for ME
I think using a sensor under the oil filter might be as dangerous as using that temp sensor that goes into the head, right next to the turbo. I'm totally lost now. Should I just take it off the battery then? (stay away from the headlights)
<strong>(should be all of you if you passed high school physics) </strong><hr></blockquote>
I have 3 and a half weeks left
[quote]Originally posted by Jonathan Martini:<strong> Maybe we've got some ME's reading!
Cheers...</strong><hr></blockquote>
I am an incoming freshman at Kettering for ME
I think using a sensor under the oil filter might be as dangerous as using that temp sensor that goes into the head, right next to the turbo. I'm totally lost now. Should I just take it off the battery then? (stay away from the headlights)
04-25-2002, 02:52 PM
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You can pick all the inputs and outputs up off the air meter connection except for the +12V. The +12V is picked up off the diagnostic port (driver side engine compartment near the purge valve).
BTW you need chip changes for different injector sizes. While the car may run with chips made for smaller injectors it will never run correctly. Trust me on this one - I've run the pro-flow with the full throttle and idle pots.
BTW you need chip changes for different injector sizes. While the car may run with chips made for smaller injectors it will never run correctly. Trust me on this one - I've run the pro-flow with the full throttle and idle pots.