Hey Bill,
Thanks for the welcome and thanks for sharing some of your background. The OEM's definitely don't have a monopoly on smart people doing some really impressive work in powertrain electronics and tuning. I was always impressed by what some of the chip companies were able to do in reverse engineering the controls and calibration, though some of us suspected there may have been some help by the way of leaked files
. Kudos to you and your team for putting out some very solid products, from what I've seen so far your products are right up there with the current OEM tools like the ATI emulators and ATI Vision software. It's impressive how much people have been able to tune these engines without the help of a "strategy" book or calibration guide. The "strategy book" our calibrators would use is basically a representation of the entire engine and transmission software. In the days of writing the software in assembly code, the strategy book was a C-code-ish representation of the assembly code, since no one could really read machine code. Once we moved to Power-PC, and we started coding directly in C, the strategy books became a big compilation of the actual C-code. When we started doing graphical algorithms in Matlab/Simulink/Stateflow and then autocoding into C-code, the strategy book was put out in two flavors - a book of all the models, and a book of all the resulting C-code. Many of the old school calibrators hate reading the models and also hate reading the autogenerated C-code, which can be hard to read because of it's creation of random variable names and re-use of those unintelligible variable names in trying to optimize ram/rom usage. Powertrain strategies and the number of "tunable" calibration parameters have exploded from when I started working to now. Most of this is driven by fuel economy and emissions regulations. The largest single piece of software in our current powertrain controls is the Diesel aftertreatment software. I laugh when people say "if the car companies wanted to, they could be making 100MPH cars no problem." If they only saw the amount of engineering, time, and money the OEM's spend to eek out tenths of MPG increases
The aftermarket tuning seems to have come a long way. I remember many years ago one of my calibration co-workers figured out a way to do a calibration dump of an aftermarket chip for a Mustang application and he was thoroughly unimpressed at the calibration changes. He told me something like "all they did was increase the WOT engine RPM based shift points by a few hundred RPM, calibrate out the VS based speed limiter, and add something to a global spark adder!" It seems like things have come a long way since then. When I got my truck engine mods done (see first post), before I yanked the trans, I went out and put some miles on it being careful not to stress things too much. I "tried" to keep boost under 30 lol, but it still felt like I was driving a completely different vehicle. I thought it drove as good or better than a new 6.7. It was quiet, smooth, powerful, didn't smoke... This was running on the hydra tunes modifed for my single shot injectors with the lowest level of HP increase over stock. Hugely impressive. Can't wait to get the trans back in when I can run it hard and not worry about it!
Speaking of P/T calibration mods, I can't officially endorse anyone breaking EPA or state laws in modifying any of their powertrain controls for on-road use. Everyone here is doing this for race-track and off-roading only, right!?!?
There's a bit more leeway on the old 7.3...it didn't really have any emissions control devices, and it certified emissions on an engine dyno - just ran at various speed/load points.
Also, I'll just go with the premise that people here modding their vehicles are doing it outside of warranty or not brining them in for warranty claims when the blow something up. In my early days of being in trans controls, when chips were coming out to modify 7.3's and people were realizing you could get a lot more torque by adding more fuel, not realizing the trans couldn't take it, resulting in smoking their 4R100's and bringing them in for warranty claims, some of the people in our software group were tasked with coming up with a way to detect a "chipped" vehicle without adding any additional hardware costs or sensors to the vehicle - software only. They came up with a pretty clever algorithm that used the torque converter when open (clutch not locked) as a torque measuring device. Knowing the K-factor curve and slip across the converter, you could infer engine torque, and it would then set an "over-torque" stored DTC code if it detected torque way above stock torque levels. Ultimately that logic never went into production - the Ford lawyers decided they didn't want to deal with pissing matches and lawsuits from customers who may have had a legitimate claim vs a non-legitimate claim.
Anyway, it's cool to see people still enjoying and making such big improvements in these old dinosaurs!