Received my MS II pcb 3.0 kit today along with a bunch of other goodies from DIY, and jumped right in. So far I think I'm into this thing for about 6 hrs, I kinda lost track because I started out so shaky that after the first hour, I decided I needed to go have lunch and a couple beers to calm my nerves. After that, no more shakes, work continued. Plugged away with no problems, every section tested out perfect... *Keep in mind I am only trying to fun fuel only at the moment, but am entertaining the through of timing control later down the road if the fuel stuff works out.*
Where I finally started getting confused was at step 50 on the Mega Manual. I sat around and read the manual over and over, and tried searching the forums but couldn't really decide on a "solid" answer. Obviously I decided against step 50b, and went with 50a, because I wasn't planning on triggering off the neg side of the coil, and would like to use the tach output off of the MSD 6AL box I currently have, which I believe is a square wave signal?
As the instructions mentioned for 50a in the note, I decided to install D2, but put a jumper wire between the leads (essentially shorting it out). I did this because I didn't want to have to try and put D2 back in later if I needed to because I don't know if I could do it with the tools on hand (I imagine I'd have to get a solder vacuum or something, I don't think the solder wick I have would be very easy to do it with), and according to the manual I could just cut the jumper, and WHAMMY the D2 is already there and would work as planned. Also installed a jumper at D1 as per instructions...
At the time I decided NOT to assemble the VR circuit because I couldn't make sense of what the manual was saying, combined with what I was reading with the MSD 6A/L ignition control found here... According to the MSD ign control page, the green & violet wires are not used... Those are the wires that connect to my distributor. The page says to use the white wire as the output from the MSII, which would be the input to the 6AL box. The MSD page says "V3 input: * Hall sensor, optical sensor, points: feed the signal directly to MegaSquirt® on DB37 pin #24 by using the Hall sensor circuit described in step #50/52 of the assembly guide. " Right? SO the signal, in my case, would be the tach output on the 6AL box... On the bottom of the 6AL box, it says to "Never use the white wire, and the GRN/VILT wires are the same time"... Well without the GRN/VILT wires connected to the distributor, the MSD box has no rpm input, and thus no tach output for the MS II box, hence the car doesn't run, and I get sad. I did some searching, and haven't come across any other threads with someone running an MSD distributor to directly trigger the MS II, so I don't know exactly what I should do here... Build the VR circuit, and (hopefully) get the signal from the distributor, then output to the white wire on the MSD box? Maybe I'm over analyzing this?
As it is, I believe I should be able to run the 6AL box off of the MSD distributor via the GRN/VILT wires as usual, and trigger the MS II via the tach output wire from the 6AL box with the Hall/opto circuit (50a) I have already assembled to run fuel only... Am I correct?
The other question I had was... Is there a good way to get the screw holes in the case going? When I tried to assemble the relay board most of the screws never got screwed all the way in, and the heads more or less ended up stripped out. I ended up siliconing the case sides to the main body because I didn't want them flopping around.
Anyway that's all for today, If I can find the time to finish the output section tomorrow, I will, but it might be a few days before I can get to it. Below is a picture of what I've done so far. I've also been taking pictures of each "section" of the manual, I was thinking of making a thread with them for people to view... I liked the v2.2 manual a lot better because it had an illustration of what you would be installing in each section, where as the 3.0 section does not. I personally feel that would speed the process along somewhat.
