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Month: February 2018

Broke

Broke

My 08 STI seems to have suffered some form of catastrophic engine failure! Wooho! I was driving home on Skyline when the engine started running like only half of the engine was firing and the other half was all fuel no air. As soon as I clutched in it died, and I was able to coast to a side street (that was quite lucky, as there are not many side streets on Skyline).

Trying to restart created all kinds of bad sounds including what sounds like something the valve train making lots of clanking noise, and very strange compression sounds. Thankfully Kristin was right behind me in the Volvo, and my brother-in-law Eric was able to come give me a hand.

We drove to our house (about a mile down the road) and loaded up my Yukon and my enclosed trailer. As luck would have it the side road I was on was sloped downward away from Skyline, so we were able to push the car and get enough speed to make in up the ramps and in the trailer.

This motor is about 5 years old, built by me in the shop. Cosworth heads and Cosworths cams, Weisco pistons and Crower rods, etc. It has been a fantastic motor taking 30+psi of boost over that 5 years, no oil consumption, and great power on E85. I switched from the EFR7670 to an EFR8374 about a year ago, and I would guess it was around 550whp.

If I had to guess right now, it sounds like I could perhaps have broken a camshaft. There have been occasional reports of cosworth cams breaking, and these are from that early era. The sounds while rotating has a sounds like part of the valves are not being actuated. Any other guesses?!

Once I get the car rolled out of the trailer and into the shop I’ll dig into it and see how it looks.

Either way, clearly time for an IAG Stage 4 closed deck block.

Skyline

Skyline

Just a light dusting of snow right now on Skyline.

Snow!

Snow!

Enough snow for sledding makes Audrey a happy girl.. and a snowman to boot.

Old

Old

My brother James Sponaugle recently moved from Indiana to Minnesota and he decided to sell his WRX. Needless to say I bought it. It is a 2002 WRX that he purchased new just a few months after I got my WRX (My car is a 02/2001 production, and his is an 04/2001 production).

I figured it was good to keep the brother cars together. The car has been relatively undriven in the last 10 years. It has a bit over 40,000 miles, and I suspect most of those miles were in the first few years.

It is a blast from the past mod-wise! It has the original 2.0L motor with an APS front mount intercooler, a VF35 turbo, an AVCR!!, the original EcuTek tune that we did back in probably late 2004, Rota wheels, Tein coilovers, STI pink injectors, Wilwood 6 pot front brakes, JDM brembo rear brakes.. and a JDM 6-speed. That is pretty much the perfect mod list from 2005!

You don’t see a lot of single owner 40k mile WRXs with nearly perfect paint, no crashes, the original engine, and a clean interior. I just need to buy Tim’s STI and I’ll have all of the cars of that era. 😉

Thanks to Lucas English for transporting the car to me from Indiana on his last trip!

A Reboot…

A Reboot…

I have used my personal domain for image hosting for many years, especially for things posted on forums.   With the popularity of platforms like Facebook it is easier to lose track of both those posts, and the images that go with them.   I will be migrating my content from those forums and as well as facebook into this site as a way to provide a simple searchable archive.

Dunes

Dunes

Wood fire pizza at the dunes shelter is a great way to wrap up the weekend. Back to Portland tomorrow, then
It is time to get the GTR on the dyno.

Rasp Zero

Rasp Zero

I took a crack at making a board layout using a Raspberry PI Zero as well as a dsPIC33 microcontroller that has two hardware CAN bus interfaces. This allows all of the CAN capture and decoding to occur in the micro, as well as filtering and cross bus processing. The dsPIC is connected to the PIZero over SPI (10MHz), which provides the queuing needed for high transfer rates while logging.

One of the goals of this board was to not only support logging of data from other CAN devices but also the ability to drive other displays and dashes. I routed 4 ‘flexible’ pins from the microcontroller to the connector, as well as 4 from the Raspberry PI. The microcontroller ones can be assigned to be SPI, i2C, UART, and other generic GPIO functions. The pins from the PI are also SPI, i2C, or UART capable. That provides a ton of extra flexibility depending on how you want to use them.

This particular dsPIC has a split flash feature which makes it easy to support firmware upgrades directly from the PI Zero.

The component costs are low, probably $20 plus $10 for the raspberry pi zero W.

Since the PI Zero W has wireless built in, configuration over a simple web interface will be easy to implement, as well as things like auto upload or auto email of log files, etc.

This could also be useful for some bus reverse engineering, as you have a good combination of 2 CAN buses with enough speed to do cross bus replication (so you can be a MITM of a device), plus some analog and digital inputs to help correlate things, all over a simple web interface.

I used a mixture of surface mount and through hole stuff as this is a prototype and I already have a bunch of the through hole parts sitting here. For the final rev I will switch most of that stuff over to surface mount.

CA

CA

Of all of the views in Monterey and Pebble Beach, I like this one the most. I suppose that is why Clint built here.

Fish

Fish

Audrey’s favorite aquarium on a beautiful day in Monterey.

Circle

Circle

A little circle trip this time. PDX-MSP-STL-SAN-MRY-PDX.