Temperature sensor to car pc

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shinny
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by shinny »

A £500 multimeter is a bit extreme just to get a one-off IAT reading! I guess if you already have it then it makes sense to use it, but I should be able to put together an array of real time temperature gauges for considerably less than that... and TBH I'd have have a real-time in cabin gauge so I can monitor the IATs over long drives or blasts around tracks to understand the heatsoaking of the system as well as improvements made by any individual changes :th:

Each to their own...


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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by shinny »

So today I did a little scripting to easily make custom dial faces and ended up with a webpage for anyone to create their own gauges faces to their own specifications!

Here's the result for the IAT gauge I'm thinking about - may not display on all browsers due to being SVG, but works with chrome for me:

Image

Link to the page to generate your own - might not be perfect but have a play: http://www.shinny.co.uk/page.php?page=gauge
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Marc2Turbo

Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by Marc2Turbo »

That is very cool! I'm nearly there with my launch control system if you fancy an arduino code swap?
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by MR2DI4 »

You can pickup a decent mutimeter with this function for way less than 500. It's also a bit of kit you cannot do without when fixing any sort of electrical problem on your car so I could not do without one. You could get one for 100-200 that would do the job like the Extech MP530 or one the Amprobe series that I used.

I agree it's a good project though and your also going to need a gauge with a higher intake temperature than 50 Deg C. No fan on a stock IC was 68 Deg C peak and when modified mine dropped 14 Deg C off the peak to 54 Deg C under sustained full boost. The ambient air temperature was in the High 20's from memory 1m from the road surface at the intakes. Even with the best system you faced with a quite a differential, thats the way thermal transfer works its not a linear function it's exponential, you simply cannot get your IAT anywhere near the ambient if your using the ambient air to do the cooling. It's a battle of diminishing returns. Even with the best set-up I would expect only another 7 to 10 Deg C improvement off the peak.
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by shinny »

I'm not using ambient air... I'm using water ;)

What I've heard about the ST205 CC says that a properly working system gets your IAT to about ambient + 10C. However everything I've done so far will make it very easy to change the range of the gauge if I get it wrong :th:

And yes, I have a multimeter, just not one as fancy as yours. That said, I'm still happier with a permanently installed in-cabin gauge...
Marc2Turbo wrote:That is very cool! I'm nearly there with my launch control system if you fancy an arduino code swap?
That may well be of interest at some point... mostly for the RPM sensing, as I don't think I'm interested in launch control myself :blush:
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by MR2DI4 »

What came out of the actual road testing on a stock set-up is that the airflow through the side mount IC location is VERY VERY bad and its obviously just hopeless in say 2nd or 3rd gear at full boost as the cooling airflow is relative to your road speed. Even running the stock fan full time made a huge difference so a decent IC running a big fan whenever your under boost results in a very good setup. Unless you have a monster build there is no need to go to a boot mounted IC or water as at this point your simply being forced to keep all the heat you can out of that cramped engine bay as possible and there is also simply not enough room in there for an air/air IC that will do the job.

Yes I would say +10 Deg is possible, but the gains vs time and expense from dropping mine another 7 to 10 Deg are minimal. The main reason I bothered to do anything at all is for safety and the reduced chances of detonation with cooler intake air rather than to pickup an extra couple of Hp. Like many things on the MR2, the initial gains are cheap and easy to get and your also able to maintain a high level of reliability if you do it right.

I would certainly be interested in the final results of your project. In terms of the gauge your really interested in the differential between the ambient air and the post IC or temp at the throttle body rather than just an absolute reading at the throttle body. This would be more usefull as an "In Cabin" reading and something the multimeter cannot do directly.

I guess your going to need this a well as you have to know the water pump is working or you will suffer from a serious heat soak problem if it stops or you have a leak. A differential reading would allow for an expanded scale meter as well as the variation should be reduced significantly.
Last edited by MR2DI4 on 27/12/12 23:57, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by shinny »

I already have an ST205 setup, so all I want are gauges to tell me how efficient everything is being. I can then monitor any changes due to modifications easily without having to look at multimeters in the boot etc. In fact my plan involves four gauges, so I'll be able to understand the efficiency of the pre-rad separately to that of the system as a whole :th:
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by MR2DI4 »

As above the differential reading would give you a kind of "Efficiency" reading.

Good luck with the project, don't forget to post the results.
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by shinny »

Yup... I'm thinking a gauge like this (difference between ambient air and the coolant before going into the CC core) would assess the efficiency of the pre-rad:

Image

I'd expect it to sit around 4-8ºC during normal cruising with a Cinq rad as pre-rad, after lots of quick mental arithmetic on my current digital gauges. I also observe hot water coming out of the core tends to make it's way back round once or twice before cooling back down to the normal level :th:
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by MR2DI4 »

At the end of the day your only interested in the air temperature going into the engine and the intake air temp like where there is already a thermistor IAT sensor on the Rev 2 in the AFM.

I actually did a throttle body "coolant" bypass on mine after measuring the throttle body temperature of 60 Deg C after just driving around normally. The air intake manifold on the engine actually gets quite hot as well and would benefit from one of those Phenolic gasket insulators as the block is transfering heat at over 80 Deg C into the inlet runners. Shame Toyota or someone else did not make the whole T-VIS plate out of Phenolic and then the problem would be solved.

The weather just does not get cold enough over here to freeze the butterfly in the throttle body so no problem.

Without these mods, the inlet to the throttle body or directly after the IC is probably the coolest point, The way I see it the air is only heating up again past this point !

I was actually surprised how hot the intake air was at the throttle body with the car just at idle after normal driving, even then it was well above ambient. I think you will be surprised at the results when you get the guage up and running. Go do need sensors that have a fast response time and are more accurate at 100 Deg or less. J and K type Thermocouples are no good.
Last edited by MR2DI4 on 28/12/12 2:54, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by shinny »

While we're at it, a modern plastic intake manifold would be nice, actually!

Edit: Darn, because of you I just spent an hour reading and researching around this thread: http://www.mr2oc.co.uk/forums/41/151986.html :blush:

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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by gavsdavs »

Made a little progress with mine - have to say it's not fun sitting still in the car with the engine running whilst driving a laptop.

So the obd software I'm trying to use is this:
http://icculus.org/obdgpslogger/

When I can get this running (kicking it off automatically is still a bit hit and miss) - I am getting traces with the following columns:
Time,Temp,RPM,Speed,MAF,Throttlepos,MPG,Lon,Lat,Alt
I'm not getting any speed values (I guess this is because the ECU is not an MR2 one and it's missing a sensor), so also not getting any MPG values. I can probably calculate those from the location data.

It will log up to about 20 points a second - which is way too many. I think I'm going to collect data every 10 seconds. GPS accuracy seems excellent.

Edit - posted a little trip round the block. Better than nothing.
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by Michael2006 »

@shinny Is your Arduino System running? How many channels could you log, think it should possible to read the sensor from a Android Phone :)
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Re: Temperature sensor to car pc

Post by shinny »

Michael2006 wrote:@shinny Is your Arduino System running? How many channels could you log, think it should possible to read the sensor from a Android Phone :)
Um - no :blush:

I'm great at ideas and rubbish at actually completing them! TO me, the interesting bit is thinking up how I would do something, and the actual implementation may be seriously delayed, if it ever happens at all. This is why it took me 3 years to fit a set of headlights and 2 years to do an ECU conversion :laughing

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