Hello all, I hope everyone had a great festive season.
I'm in the process of reviving my old Radical SR3 to race in our local Sports Car category this year. I would love to be able to get some data logging as well as better GPS lap data. I think the AiM SOLO 2 DL will fit the bill but I'm looking for certainty around whether I will be able to connect the SOLO 2 DL to the MBE9A4 via the CAN bus. According to the MBE documentation the MBE ECU has a single CAN set at 500kbit/s to match all MBE devices. That document talks about how to set up the CAN data stream, and there is an AiM document that talks about setting up AiM devices to communicate with MBE ECUs. That all sounds promising but I'm hoping someone here has some real world experience with this kind of set up?
Thank you very much in advance, this forum has been a great resource in sorting the car to this point.
Hi Dan,
Yep should be no problems with Solo 2 DL and the MBE CAN datastream. Apologies if I have missed it somewhere but assume you have upgraded the car to the 9A4 and it is not running on the 992 that the Radical MBE cars were supplied with?
Attached is a screenshot from the AIM showing the channels that are available via the datastream, plus a few more further down the list.
Should be a case of connect it, get it power plus the CAN + and CAN - then set the DL up as you wish.
Hi Dan, thank you very much for the detailed response, much appreciated. Yes I do have an unlocked MBE9A4 in the car, glad to hear it should work! I may be showing my lack of knowledge of CAN bus here, but do you foresee any issues with running both the (ancient) factory Radical dash and the Solo 2 DL together? Reading the MBE documentation it looks as though the CAN needs to be configured to output data for the AiM device - do you think that doing this will interfere with the operation of the factory dash?
No, there should be absolutely no problems at all.
The old Radical dash does not run on a CAN system and has its own stand alone sensors so in no way should be affected.
The only thing you will find is with that dash running its own sensors there is limited information being sent to the ECU for your datastream. You should get water temp, TPS, RPM, battery voltage via CAN to your DL but unless you have them added I don't think items like oil temp, oil pressure, fuel pressure and gear position are sent to the ECU so would not be streamed to the DL. Oil pressure is always a good one to have and means you can check for oil surge.
The 9A4 will take some of these as additional inputs but will involve additional sensors and wiring, plus the 9A4 is limited on spare inputs.
With regards to set up the MBE should have its base CAN datastream tables as standard and the Solo will 'understand' this as soon as you select that you are receiving a MBE datasteam. If you go for it and need some help I can set you up a DL config that you can just transmit in to get you going.
G'day Dan, ... Another new Radical owner that I know will be glad of your help! I know I have benefitted on here from advice from you and a few others like you that are willing to reply to detailed questions.
In case you haven't worked it out, Dan and his car are also in Tassie. We've been to the local track a couple of times, but Dan really only got to drive his car in anger during last weekends visit. I'm trying to help as much as possible by being there as I know how steep the learning curve was when I was the only one using a Radical here... I'm also hoping Dan will do OK in our local race series this year.
Re your comments on the limited data that will be available out of the MBE, I suggested to Dan that might be the case.
- You mentioned an oil pressure sensor being a good thing to have. His car is a 1340cc engine and has a factory dry sump, so I guess that makes it less likely to be a real issue? Probably still good to have though.
- You also mentioned gear position won't be available via CAN, but just so that Dan knows the Solo2 DL will probably be able to display gear values based on some math channels we can set up in the dash configuration.... so at least we can infer the current gear (using GPS speed and RPM)... at least he should be able to track it in the data.
@CharleyH... for future reference I will still claim my Radical is the 'Southernmost Radical' in the world.
Dan lives about 6km's further North on the earth's surface 😂
Morning Rod, I sort of recognised Dan's name and had an idea, must have seen something something out there on the internet. Always here to help if it can.
Great to hear that Dan has you to hand for help, having someone knowledgeable and close by to help will be a massive thing, as you say there is a lot to learn when it comes to these cars, especially when you are dealing with an old model.
With it being a 1340cc engine but such an early model is it a 'hybrid'? Gen 1 engine with a Gen 2 crank? Or has it been completely updated to Gen 2?
The very early cars had a smaller oil tank and also could have an earlier scavenge pump, depending on the last rebuild/update, which can mean that these cars are more prone to oil surge then later ones. Obviously with this car not being on the Life Racing system it also doesn't have things like the oil pressure trip so monitoring oil pressure and checking for surge is important - at least to the guys who build engines 🙂
Unfortunately for Dan there has been such a huge number of updates over the years the earlier cars can throw up other problems. In general it is not worth spending a large amount upgrading these cars so use them as they are and then update along the line to another car if/when the bug takes hold.
Agreed, calculated gear is something that can be done, I have not used it too much but it should be reliable. Or again you maybe able to feed gear into the MBE, as the engine has an OEM sensor as standard, if you are not running a stand alone gear indicator. Again these earlier cars tend not to have the aftermarket dual output sensors of later cars.
Thanks Dan & Rod!
Rod has significantly understated the assistance he has provided me, starting from a phone call out of the blue before I bought the car... without the immense generosity with his time and knowledge (particularly seeing as I'm his competition haha) I'd still be staring at what would be an expensive garage ornament, rather than preparing to race the car in March.
Dan - you have perfectly answered my poorly worded query: the factory dash does not run on CAN bus but uses standalone sensors. Good for simplicity of connection but unfortunate that it will limit the data available on CAN, it may be worth looking into additional oil pressure sensors per your comment Dan to allow logging. I've purchased the Solo 2 DL, so will have a play with it when it arrives here and see what I can get.
I don't know a great deal about the engine other than it has an 'extreme' branded plaque on it, it has an unlocked MBE9A4 ECU, it was dyno tuned in West Australia (I was told by the owner at the time "it gained 20hp" which seems perhaps optimistic unless it was running on very safe base start up map), and the engine hours when I got it showed 14.7 hours (checked in Easimap6), which I assume is when the new ECU was installed. It does however appear to have the same sump and large oil tank as Rod's RSX, so I assume that is a positive.
Re the gen1/2 comment - the previous owner is insistent that the motor is actually a 1300cc not 1340cc - if this is the case then it would be an original gen 1 Hayabusa motor I assume?
It seems to run well, and based on Rod's experience and common sense, the oil pressure and temps seem to behave 'as expected'. Given that it is such an unknown, my plan is basically to run it as-is, treating and maintaining it well and see how it goes.
Thanks again for your help Dan - Rod speaks extremely highly of you, and your willingness to help a beginner like me is a huge asset to this community. When I make it over to the UK at some point the drinks are on me!
@rjbender I can confirm that you are still the southern-most Radical - whenever I visit your house the weather is worse and colder than it is at home 😆
@rjbender I can confirm that you are still the southern-most Radical - whenever I visit your house the weather is worse and colder than it is at home 😆
Dan (@danh), when you add your car to the Registry we can say that you have the second most southern Radical.. or is it the third most southern Radical since Rod now has two. 😂
@charleyhradicalsportscarregistry-com - I can't tell you how much I wish that I had thought of that! - great point Charley!!
@charleyhradicalsportscarregistry-com Hi Charley, yes soon to be third most Southern! I created a registry entry for the car last year - it's in the 'pending' page! Thanks for running such a valuable resource here.
