Jet Jockey/A4 Pilot

First I took the car out today for a major run around town to see how the electrical system would hold up. The news is good, nothing failed.

I took the precaution to hook up the Vag Com to get temperature read outs because I have no dash at this time. Everything seems normal. The repositioned OBD II port works normally. The only bad news is that I cannot get any speed readout from the ECU. I guess this ties in with the steering wheel angle sensor/ABS problem we have. Too bad but I don't care because I ordered the AIM GPS sensor ($600) yesterday and that way we will get accurate info from that sensor to the AIM data logger and onto the dash display... Problem solved!

Now about the AIM Pista. Part of my drive was to go see the vendor and installer of the unit. We wanted to see first hand if the Pista needed to be connected into the OBD II port with an harness AIM can provide ($89) or if the info we had gotten from several sources were right and we could skip all together the OBD II harness and hook it up directly to the CANBUS system by using only two CANBUS wires (a positive and a negative).

Well hold and behold the darn thing worked with only two CANBUS wires! That is so great and that means I can now have all the info the ECU sees and have it displayed and downloaded. We will have to see what info is available. This is possible because AIM got the Audi protocol.

I took a picture of the Pista hooked up to the car but unfortunately I could get one with the "shift lights" flashing. We had programmed the shift lights to come on at a low rev limit to see them in action but I couldn't get the timing right for the picture. You'll have to trust me on this, it is very cool.

Basically there are two set of shift lights at the top (like eye brows) a total of ten LEDs. In each row there are two greens, one yellow and two reds. You can program the lights to come on at any RPM and once at the lights come on at the pre set RPM (red line) they all start to flash to let you know it is time to do something you dummy! I'll try to get some pictures of this in action maybe later next week once it is installed.


Pista in action... The RPM scale was brought down to a more reasonable 8000 RPM. At far right you speed the speed read out in KPH (digital units). Right in the middle just below the 5K RPM there is the gear position (1-6). Middle left, the water temp at 100C, followed in the middle by another display (best lap?) and on the middle right the actual time.
Finally bottom left is the Air Intake Temp (34C) followed by the throttle position sensor (TPS) at 9.6 percent or degrees?

I can switch to any other read out like oil temp, oil pressure and so on. BTW those two sensors came with the kit and will be installed too.

On either side we have the "alarm" LEDs which can be set to any high and low values you want. EI; high water temp and low water temp, High and low oil temps, high and low oil pressure and so on.

<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b79/mlab601/CAR-AIMMXLPista-TestedON-May200802.jpg">