LC-2 Grounding Location - ECU?

Anything related to the Innovate brand of wideband devices.

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Seikensilver
 

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LC-2 Grounding Location - ECU?

Post by Seikensilver »

Hello, first post - first question:

I'm not sure if this is a dumb question and I'm dreaming this up in my head, but I swear I was reading somewhere, I think specifically related to Nistune, that it was recommended you ground the wideband controller to the ECU ground (pin 60 I think for my BNR32 ECU) because you want the ECU and wideband to get the same reading or something? Something about an offset in readings? Am I crazy?

I believe I saw or heard this recently when researching but I can't for the life of me find any reference to it related to Nistune. Bunch of Googling, checked the Nistune PDFs, FAQs, forums, videos I watched prior etc.

Meanwhile the LC-2 instructions just say to ground it to the battery. I did find discussions about grounding it to the chassis or other options and getting noise etc. Unfortunately, I've been working on the car all day and couldn't post the question in time so it is wired to a battery ground at the moment.
Matt
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Re: LC-2 Grounding Location - ECU?

Post by Matt »

Its an interesting question.

https://www.innovatemotorsports.com/sup ... Manual.pdf
The BLACK wire should be grounded to a solid ground source. The best possible ground source would be the battery ground (-) post
Part of the reason, is because the innovate also powers the wideband O2 sensor heater which uses high current so the return side (negative) should be also able to handle the current

However the innovate also outputs the analogue output signals which is used by a DLP converter (or similar). So both devices need to share the same ground.

It is not necessary to measure this against ECU ground necessarily, because the battery is the ground reference, and there is no direct connection between ECU and wideband.

So it is necessary that the wideband and any device using the 0-5V output for conversion do share the same ground
Seikensilver
 

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Re: LC-2 Grounding Location - ECU?

Post by Seikensilver »

Okay gotcha, that makes some sense. So if anything I should have my multi-gauge display grounded to the same spot.

Unrelated but unfortunately the wideband sensor died before I could even use it. LC-2 throwing the Error 8 code. Started the car once and it seemed to work very briefly. Bought the kit through Amazon and now seeing a bunch of reviews (for the sensor itself mostly) suggesting a bad batch and many faulty sensors. Waiting to hear back from Innovate.
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Re: LC-2 Grounding Location - ECU?

Post by Matt »

The sensors are a bosch unit normally, which are not warrantied by Innovate from memory. See how you go. Considering it died straight away hopefully you might get it sorted
Seikensilver
 

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Re: LC-2 Grounding Location - ECU?

Post by Seikensilver »

It seems Innovate/Autometer do in fact warranty them. Initially emailed support and was pointed to the repair/warranty replacement form and I mailed the sensor in. It took about a week for it to show back up at my door. During that week though I picked up another Bosch 4.9 sensor and it would not even calibrate. The warrantied sensor then arrived, it calibrated and worked in the car for about 5 mins of idling before throwing another Error 8.

So the current state of affairs is that I called them and they told me to just ship the LC-2 in. Seems kinda crazy to me that it'd be defective but lets hope so. All my connections seem okay and I'm getting 12v+ at the LC-2 connection. I also noticed when testing the two most recent sensors that if I used the LogWorks software to watch the sensor during power-up, the sensor would reach 16% warm up and then stop for a bit before throwing the Error 8 code.

In relation to what we were talking about for grounding locations, I did watch and notice that my digital multi gauge was getting about a .5+ higher AFR reading than the software was connected to the LC-2. Perhaps this is the offset and I should probably attempt to ground my digital multi-gauge display to the same battery ground that the LC-2 is using.
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