OK - with most of the little annoyances with my car sorted out and ZERO budget until I sell the ACE headers and other bits and pieces, I've started delving into self-tuning on ECUTek again. Available technologies have come a LONG way in the couple of years since I last dabbled on this side of things, most notably the availability of AI tools like ChatGPT, so I'm going to leverage them to hopefully make this easier.
I'm working on building out some project instruction files and prompts to make use of ChatGPT in analyzing my ECUTek logs and making tuning suggestions based on what is found in them. This was one of the most time-consuming parts of my previous self-tuning efforts, and while it's not instantaneous feedback by any stretch of the imagination, it's a LOT better than manually going through a 40 minute long, 53,000 line log file!
One big caveat here - ChatGPT WILL make mistakes and / or make stuff up if you don't constrain it with some very specific instructions or prompting.
For example, on one initial pass on MAF Scaling before building out the instructions, it was telling me to increase the g/s values for a section of the MAF Scaling table where LTFT's showed the ECU was consistently pulling fuel (which would indicate that the feedback from the O2 sensors was saying LESS air was coming in for a given MAF voltage than expected). So what was really needed was a LOWER g/s value (so that airflow was being correctly reported), not higher.
A VERY basic logic error that you'd think a "smart" AI wouldn't make, but it did.
So - short version: AI tools like ChatGPT have the potential to save a lot of grunt work when it comes to data analysis without purpose-built software, but don't trust them to necessarily provide you with the right answer. You need to build in some checks and balances with your instructions / prompting, AND spot check things to make sure it's on the right track!
Once I have things built out and tested, I'll be happy to share the project files for other people to try.
EDIT #1: And of course, now that I've decided to go this route, my laptop decides to die...
Looks like one of the hard drives failed. Trying to repair it now, otherwise I have to spend money I don't have to get a new laptop. To be fair, I guess, it IS eight years old. Just annoying, and not in the budget at the moment.
EDIT #2: After many hours of fighting with it to try and get my laptop back up and working, I decided to just bite the bullet and picked up a new (to me) laptop instead. Now getting that set up, and then I'll be back on my way with self-tuning...
