As of July 14th, the V 3.0 mainboard has been released. This board offers a number of hardware improvements over the V 2.2 design which most of us currently use. There are a lot of improvements over the V 2.2 design, the most important ones being the integration of the Flyback board, separate grounds for the sensitive digital components and the noisy injector drivers, new short-circuit protection for the fuel injector drivers, and a prototyping area which will make boost controlling, knock sensing, and other circuits easy to install.

Unfortunately, there is no practical integrated coil pack driver yet. There is one included on the V 3.0 board but it is a 1 wire output and I do not see how it can work with 2 coils.

Hopefully I’ll get my new board by this weekend so I can play around with it and figure out how to adapt it to my current setup.

Nate, it seems like the component of choice now to drive a coilpack, is the VB921's. These are dedicated ignition coil driver transistors, and many people have now had very good sucess with them. I actually got 5 of these things a while ago, back before I ran the mitsu module. I got them to work, but never did drive the car with them. I am actually going to hook these back up, and see if my misfire issues go away. These transistors are a perfect match for the MS, since they are designed to work with a 5v signal, and have built in overcurrent protection. This is the digikey datasheet on them:

http://rocky.digikey.com/WebLib/ST%20Micro/Web%20Data/VB921ZVFI_SP.pdf

I have a feeling these are going to be better suited to work with the MS and the ignition LED circuits for us on the current 2.2 boards, rather than using the Mitsu transistor module. We will see.

Hmmm, looks like a neat little component, I wonder why there is only one of them in the V 3.0 board.

It's definately not a drop-in for the 2222 (LED17 and LED19 drivers) but with a little modification, like bolting the component to the case as a heat sink, I can definately see a strong possibility of eliminating the external 4G63 dongle.

Originally posted by ner947
Hmmm, looks like a neat little component, I wonder why there is only one of them in the V 3.0 board. It's definately not a drop-in for the 2222 (LED17 and LED19 drivers) but with a little modification, like bolting the component to the case as a heat sink, I can definately see a strong possibility of eliminating the external 4G63 dongle.

Yeah, i've seen a few posts of people doing that exact thing with the 921's. Bolt them to the case, and thats it for a heat sink. Wires going to the engine bay are already there, for the coilpack triggers. The LED mods and 5v pullup resistor circuits we use now, directly fire these transistors, so no diff mods needed for these over using the mitsu ignitor. Hopefully this week I can get around to hooking them up and seeing how it works out.

Wow i didnt know there were that many changes to the board! Did you order the board as kit or is it sold separatly Nate?

Terry

I ordered the whole kit from diyautotune.com, they got my kit out the following business day! That's how you run a company. I built it up, poked the tachometer input to get it ready for the stock crank angle sensor, did the spark modifications, built up a new fan control circuit, and hooked it up.

With the exact same MSQ, it ran leaner. I checked everything... Watched the realtime display, recorded a datalog and watched the big picture, probed various voltages with my scope, etc. I was stumped. I had to increase my required fuel from 8.2ms to 9.8ms to get the idle AFR back to normal. My idle PW's went from 2.3ms to 2.7ms. I hooked up spark and fan control, everything works up to peak boost but I didn't expect that I would need to tweak my required fuel like that.

The 3.0 board is pretty nice... I took a good look at how they routed the board and it looks like a real EE did it this time, unlike the 2.2 board which looks like it was routed by an amateur. This board seems to be ment to be paired with a MSII CPU and not a MSI because of the labeling and a few other things. There is a lot other extra junk too, like the VR tachometer input circuit which I built but will probably never use. There is also only one ignition driver on the board which I still don't understand... I didn't even bother putting it in. How many people have just 1 coil? Weird. I'm still using my 4G63 module which is working fine.

Originally posted by ner947
With the exact same MSQ, it ran leaner. I checked everything... Watched the realtime display, recorded a datalog and watched the big picture, probed various voltages with my scope, etc. I was stumped. I had to increase my required fuel from 8.2ms to 9.8ms to get the idle AFR back to normal. My idle PW's went from 2.3ms to 2.7ms. I hooked up spark and fan control, everything works up to peak boost but I didn't expect that I would need to tweak my required fuel like that.

Well in a way that starts to make sense for me, since I now run the 460cc injectors, and my req fuel is like 8.6ms. The msq i got from you Nate, was way too lean for some reason? My idle PW are almost the same as yours too..wierd...The fuel side is running just great now though with a little tweaking :) 15 psi duty cycles are in the 60-70% range too.
One more thing i noticed about your msq Nate, under the codbase options, you have "msnSpark" selected, WITH the "neon/420A" selected also. As far as I know, you are only supposed to have the neon code selected. I have no clue as to what having both of those selected would do either..

Nate you should have waited for MS 2. Shipping starts in the second week of August.