Monthly Archives: March 2010

A Camera For The Car

A Picture from the camera mounted in the car

A Picture from the camera mounted in the car

I received a Countour HD Camera as a Christmas gift, which is just about the perfect thing to receive, aside from cool car parts ;-) It’s basically like other semi-ruggedized cameras in that it has an aluminum case and meant to stand up to some abuse. This sort of thing would be perfect for, say, a drag car. Because of their size, they’re not created to produce the best images in the world because of the lack of optics on the thing.

Even still, It should give me a great reference to check out my driving, consistency, track conditions and even a rough idea of engine RPM and boost levels. This will be a really good tool for me to be able to use for my own purposes. And, of course, it gives me a way to let other people ride in the car, even if they can’t actually experience every sense of what it’s like. If you really want to know what it’s like, you’ll have to build your own ;-)

The ContourHD Mounted to my roll cage

The ContourHD Mounted to my roll cage

I think I spent about 20 minutes on the mount for the camera. the camera itself comes with a flat-surface mount, is essentially foam-rubber and apparently designed to dampen vibration. I have no flat surfaces in the center of the car with which to mount it, so I whipped up something quickly. After all, it really didn’t make sense to make it all that complicated. I had some stock .125″ 6061 aluminum laying around and ordered up a vibration-dampening pipe clamp from McMaster-Carr (one of my favorite places to shop, since they carry almost everything) that was the appropriate ID of my roll cage tubing. Then, I drilled a few holes in the 6061 plate, put a few rivet-nuts in the vibration-dampening clamp and bolted the whole setup to my roll cage. Now, until I get the car running and tuned and on the track I will have no idea how well this will actually work, but time will tell. I’ll let you see the results. I’m hoping it will be okay.

It runs – again! :-o

Over the weekend I worked on getting the new Haltech Platinum Sport 1000 installed in the Talon. Previously, as I said earlier, I was running an E6S-8, which was just too limiting for me and what I want to do with the car.

So, Saturday afternoon I spent a couple of hours pulling the old ECU out of the car, and putting the new ECU into the car. It was pretty straight forward in that I was able to pull the pins out of my existing Haltech connector and install them into the new Sport 1000’s connector without too many problems. Throughout the whole exercise, I ended up having to crimp and splice about 10 wires into the system, and five of those were ground wires! The new Haltech has a concept of a set of pins exclusively for sensor ground which the old ECU didn’t have along with multiple grounds to be used for the Haltech itself, whereas the E6S only has one ECU ground pin. I also ended up re-wiring the shielded cables that the Haltech uses, since the old setup bundled all the grounds for a bunch of items into one big ball of solder (Haltech did that from the factory!)

So, after the new cables, I turned it on and hoped that it would start. And it did. Pretty easily. No drama, no issues, no problems. The battery compensation map needs to be adjusted, and it runs rich in general, but it’s not bad. I will have to do some tuning though, no doubt.

Randomly, Q16 is weird fuel. You know your brain cells are dying, and you know it’s not good for you, but you don’t mind the smell anyway. It’s weird.