My 3.4 DOHC powered red and black camo '88 Fiero Track Car

[Series8217]

New seat! Got a Sparco Evo to replace my very very old (1999 build date, I think) Sparco Rev.
I also put new upholstery on the Corbeau A4 on the passenger side. Went from red seats to black ones. I might do custom upholstery at some point to spice things up a bit, but I'm liking the black for now.

It weighs 21.3 lbs including my 3mm thick steel mounts. I designed these mounts in CAD. First I test-fitted the seat with some cheap Amazon.com mounts, then I 3D scanned the seat and temporary mounts, designed the new brackets, and had them lasered and bent by Send Cut Send.

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[Series8217]

Update for April 2024

After I had some autocrosses under my belt and a lot of new confidence in the car, I booked a weekend with NASA at Buttonwillow Raceway and got to work on the last few major items on my track prep list.

First on the list was recovery points. I checked my front tow loop and it was still in good shape. No work needed there.

I also added a new tow hook that bolts to the rear wing mounts, along with nicer wing mount hardware. No more shiny silver on this black and red car.

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I also added a LifeLine 360 Novec fire suppression system... because Fiero.

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This also required completing Rev A of my totally custom center stack. You will notice nothing is familiar here, because I replaced everything but the dash. The center vent stack HVAC control surround, and Fire suppression button panel are my design and 3D-printed in ABS. The center tunnel cover is aluminum wrapped in vinyl.

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You might notice something else new behind the steering wheel... yep that's a digital dash. I'm using a Joying 10.25" head unit running RealDash, which connects to the CAN bus. I'll go into a LOT more detail on this in a later post, because there's a lot of custom work software and hardware work behind it.

I finished up the fire system install and got the digital dash working the same day I loaded my car onto a trailer to take to the track -- a weekend with NASA at Buttonwillow Raceway. That event is detailed in my other thread here.

Despite the oil pan leak and lots of rain, the track weekend was overall a success. Nothing I built or designed broke, the car was getting faster and faster, the ABS worked amazing even in the wet, and I'm really motivated to continue taking this car to the next level.

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[Series8217]

My big project for April/May was to finally add some true datalogging capability to the car, and put a cherry on top of the interior.

I picked up a Joying Android head unit, and permanently installed a USB CAN interface inside that works with the RealDash app --- a professional quality digital dash engine that runs on Android, Linux, and iOS and is fully customizable and programmable to do pretty much anything you want. It's basically a 2D game engine designed specifically for car dashboards.

I designed and 3D printed mounts to place the head unit "brain box" directly on the steering column, and the display in front of it.

I originally tried to hide the head unit under the left speaker grill, but it was tricky to find enough room even after I had 3D scanned that whole area with the dashboard removed. That's ok, this will get covered with a shroud anyway.

Here you can see the head unit without the display.

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Since the dash communicates via CAN bus, which Fieros don't have, I needed to get all of my vehicle sensors onto CAN. For the MK60E5 ABS module, this was trivial -- it already outputs a plethora of data from its CAN interface, including:
- individual wheel speeds and brake pressure, so I can monitor brake bias in datalogs or in real time
- inline and lateral acceleration and yaw rate
- ABS control state (e.g in intervention or not)

For supplementary sensors such as water pressure, oil temperature, and fuel level, I'm using an AEM 30-2226 6 Channel CAN Module.

Engine data is a bit trickier. I'm still running the stock GM "9396" ECU from 1991, which is ancient and slow by today's standards... even by 1996 standards. This ECU does have a serial data output line. It's a single wire ALDL interface that operates at a baud rate of 8192. It's possible to connect this interface to a standard UART with just a few passive components -- a resistor and a diode to split the send/receive lines into the microcontroller. Using a Seeed Studio CANBedFD development board for it's CAN interface and automotive power supply, I implemented firmware for an ALDL-CAN bridge and connected my stock ECU to its UART. Now I have the full diagnostic data stream from the 1991 ECU on CAN so I can datalog it with pretty much anything -- including my dash.

You can find the ALDL-CAN bridge source code on my github: https://github.com/series8217/aldl-can-bridge

Very exciting to see live data streaming into the dash!

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After I confirmed the electrical system was working and the display was in a good spot with real graphics running on it, I designed and 3D printed a shroud and sun shade. The print is a little rough as I only had time to print it with draft settings but I'll do a reprint this summer when my printer has some idle time.

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I used the Porsche 992 GT3 R technical manual as a reference for the gauge layout. I have multiple pages including the race display shown here, as well as a warmup page (monitoring engine vitals, oil temp, water temp, water pressure, etc), a track map, chassis diagnostics (individual wheel speeds and brake pressure), etc. The diagnostic pages are very helpful for making sure systems are working properly after repairing or replacing components.

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With the CAN bus sorted and RealDash working, I could log performance and diagnostic data, and see a lot of real-time information that previously required a GM or BMW scan tool. However, due to the way the Android OS isolates files between applications, it's a bit of a pain to get data logs off of the dash. Also, once you get the data off it has to be converted to a format compatible with race analysis software in order to get insights for improving vehicle and driver performance. All of these steps waste valuable time between track session. Time better spent looking at the data or working on the car.

As fortune would have it, another racer friend was in town to visit the same weekend as a Speed District track day at Buttonwillow. So he flew down with more datalogging gear and race safety equipment than normal luggage, and we headed to the track to test them all. At one point we had 4 different datalogging systems and 3 cameras on in the car. By the end of the weekend, one prevailed... Stay tuned!