heinzboehmer's 2002 Topaz 6MT Coupe

[heinzboehmer]

Also, nice, managed to finish the two remaining operations without breaking the mill again:



Also, took the unbraced M3 down to the machine shop and I'm very surprised at how much I didn't hate it. I was expecting it to feel almost disgusting in the hands, but not at all. It does feel floppy and there is a very obvious amount of grip missing when driving it hard, but it felt fine.

The loss of rigidity is fairly noticeable during normal driving as well, especially with the amount of extra steering input it needs to handle things like fast sweeping turns on the highway. The amount I usually give it felt like 20% too little.

Also, rather amusingly, I found myself instinctively leaning sideways in my seat to counter the lateral loads I'm used to. I had no idea this was something that I did, but it became very obvious after taking some fast on ramps and finding myself overshooting the lean. Guess my brain was expecting more grip, but the chassis never caught up

All in all, definitely prefer the braced car, but it's comforting to have confirmed that all these changes simply augment that special E46 feel and don't flat out replace it with something else.

[heinzboehmer]

Miles/kilometers? 10 miles= 16km

Cluster may expected kilometers and show your units (miles)

Huh, that's an interesting theory. Should be easy to test out by swapping units back and forth. Will report back.

[Obioban]

Miles/kilometers? 10 miles= 16km

Cluster may expected kilometers and show your units (miles)

[heinzboehmer]

Very cool, I'm very curious to hear what the answer is with regards to the base 10/16 thing - that's weird!

Yeah it's bizarre. I need to go look at the actual IBus command being sent to double check that I'm using the library correctly, but it seems fine after a quick glance through the code.

Experienced a bit of tunnel vision with base16 thing yesterday, but now that I think about it, the behavior as a whole of this feature is not at all what I expected. This is meant to be implemented as a "X m/ft remaining until next turn" thing, so I would have expected the cluster to scale the data in the incoming command by 10 (or maybe even 100), to save on message length. Not entirely sure in what situation "turn left in 3m" would be useful...

Also, the fact that it does the weird base16 thing and maxes out at uint8 means that it only displays up to 165. Again, when would numbers that small be useful?

I did have to code the cluster with NCS to have it react to the commands, so maybe there's some scaling option I missed that I can use to my advantage. Ooor maybe there's some flags hidden in the upper bits. We'll see.

That's a cool find.I always wanted to retrofit a oil pressure gauge to my car, and I think the integration in the business CD would be perfect regarding placement to see it at a glance. Not sure if it makes sense with refresh rate though.

Yeah, refresh rate on K bus would not be great. You can do CAN (and even analog) with something like Gauge.S, which might be a better platform for it.

Also wanted to give feedback regarding your firewall plug, a friend of mine and me both printed and installed it in our cars. It definitely improves the sound of the airbox, so that's a super cool mod. +1 on amazing print quality with pet-cf and 1.2kg saved :-)
Did you also scan the original cabin air filter housing? Would be another way to save some weight.

Nice! That's awesome to hear.

I do have a scan of the cabin air filter housing, but I did not recreate that piece in CAD. I used the scan as a reference to base the design of my modified filter housing on.

Here's the scan if you want to use it for anything: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/7e...fe3bf8e81c64d2

(link should take you directly to it, but if it doesn't, it's "E46 Cabin Air Filter Housing" inside the "References" folder)

IDK what you are talking about this whole project is full of beauty shots.

Ha, fair enough. I do think it's probably worth busting out the DSLR and grabbing some decent pics of the setup, instead of shitty, low light phone pics.

Any pics of this mount w/o the phone? This is on my list, not sure what i want to use.

Post 580

https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/main-forum/member-build-journals/13854-heinzboehmer-s-2002-topaz-6mt-coupe?p=273393#post273393

I like this one too:

https://www.rennline.com/exactfit-ma...nt-sku-pm01-69

oceansize beat me to it. It isn't really all that pretty, but it's designed to be functional and somewhat easy to print. If I won't be using my phone, I just remove the mount from the vent and throw it in the glovebox. One of my requirements when designing this was that it should be installable/removable in single digit number of seconds.

[oceansize]

Any pics of this mount w/o the phone? This is on my list, not sure what i want to use.

Post 580

https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/main-forum/member-build-journals/13854-heinzboehmer-s-2002-topaz-6mt-coupe?p=273393#post273393

I like this one too:

https://www.rennline.com/exactfit-magnetic-phone-mount-sku-pm01-69

[Keith_MN]

If I do want to pull up a map, I just use my phone on a mount up on the dash. I printed this thing and really like where it puts the screen:

Any pics of this mount w/o the phone? This is on my list, not sure what i want to use.

[George Hill]

Turns out the painter who's gonna paint these parts is on vacation until next week. No big deal, but the final beauty shots are slightly delayed.

IDK what you are talking about this whole project is full of beauty shots.

[rtrules]

Also wanted to give feedback regarding your firewall plug, a friend of mine and me both printed and installed it in our cars. It definitely improves the sound of the airbox, so that's a super cool mod. +1 on amazing print quality with pet-cf and 1.2kg saved :-)
Did you also scan the original cabin air filter housing? Would be another way to save some weight.

[rtrules]

That's a cool find.
I always wanted to retrofit a oil pressure gauge to my car, and I think the integration in the business CD would be perfect regarding placement to see it at a glance. Not sure if it makes sense with refresh rate though.

[karter16]

I still don't exactly understand why the number displayed in the cluster doesn't follow the number sent to it via IBus, but that's a question for later. It seems to be counting in base 16, but displaying in pseudo-base 10, super weird.

Very cool, I'm very curious to hear what the answer is with regards to the base 10/16 thing - that's weird!

[heinzboehmer]

This is cool:

The factory nav can display the distance to the next turn in the cluster, so I figured I could exploit this capability and display whatever I want (well, mostly) by sending IBus messages with my BlueBus. As per usual, Ted's codebase is awesome, so there's already a function to handle this.

Here's my horribly hacky proof of concept code that you see running in the video:



I still don't exactly understand why the number displayed in the cluster doesn't follow the number sent to it via IBus, but that's a question for later. It seems to be counting in base 16, but displaying in pseudo-base 10, super weird.

I tried with a uint16 as well, but the number in the cluster reset back to 0 once ike_i went above 255. I think I'll sweep through a uint64 just to see if there's any interesting behavior from the cluster with the higher numbers, but I doubt I'll find anything.

Anyway, the real question is what to do with this newfound capability. I'm thinking that displaying the current gear might be a good starting point. My Gauge.S already calculates that, so just need to figure out how to get the info from it to the BlueBus and should be good to go.

A friend also suggested adding a "do not downshift" indicator, where some extra symbol is displayed next to the current gear whenever downshifting would result in an overrev. Seems like symbols are off the table, but I might be able to rapidly flash the displayed gear or something along those lines. We'll see.

[heinzboehmer]

Turns out the painter who's gonna paint these parts is on vacation until next week. No big deal, but the final beauty shots are slightly delayed.

The car has no front bracing installed at all right now and I'm kinda excited to drive it around like that for a bit, especially after becoming used to the stiffened chassis. Will report back on driving experience.

Coincidentally, I just got word that the mill is back up and running, so I'll get a chance to mill the last two slots before paint. After looking at everything yesterday, I really dont think the milling is at all necessary, but I've already done one side and the asymmetry is gonna bother me forever if I don't do the other.

[maupineda]

New mounts will make it worse, engine would raise a bit v worn / used ones. Fillet was the right choice for sure

[heinzboehmer]

Suspect it’s time you get new engine mounts.

They're a couple years (maybe 10k mi?) old.

I think I just didn't leave enough clearance. The stock part tucks up a lot up front, but I left more material on mine because the cutout for the braces makes it a bit floppier. The radius I added yesterday gives an extra 8 mm of clearance and should keep the part's stiffness pretty much unchanged.

[Obioban]

Suspect it’s time you get new engine mounts.