Hey everyone, I just finished my "Controls" class in my engineering curriculum, and being familiar with tuning, well, the two seemed to go hand-in-hand.

So to those of you who know what I'm babbling about, are typical EMS's like AEM, stock Honda (crome, hondata, neptune, etc.), and even big dogs like MoTeC; are they built upon a linear, time-invariant model, with different types of PI, PD, and PID control masked by a clever GUI to make changes with? Or have they been written in a much more complicated non-linear framework? I'm pretty sure there's no adaptive control present (price tags are a few decimal places too short for that lol).

Just wondering...

Thanks for anyone who has this level of knowledge and/or experience!

 

If I remember correctly Chris Delgado (bugermass) has mentioned that ProEFI uses PI or PID for traction control by putting wheelspeed sensors on both the front and rear wheels to calculate the amount of slip.

Everything is happening so fast on a motor that I'm not sure what else would be good candidates to use a control scheme on. What engineering discipline are you in? I took a few controls classes with my Chemical Engineering background, and they were pretty fun.

 

Aerospace engineering. I took this undergrad controls class, and like you said it was surprisingly fun. At my level (rookie), only linear, time invariant controls is offered, but it preps you to take non-linear controls (grad. level) right out the door if you fancy. From what I understand, physical systems can be roughly modeled using modern linear control theory, but the industry standard is definitely non-linear controls, as no systems are really linear, ever. Learning to tune with Hondata, I was wondering if the R&D went into a non-linear framework or if they have a really complex linear setup with tons of curvefitting tools to break the physical system down into a linear characteristic equation.