LT1 Caprice with Gen3 PCM (part 1 of many)

I love my Caprice. It's a beat up old 1995 Houston DPS car that has had way too much abuse in it's life. Plain white, came with an LT1, limited slip differential, dual exhaust, heavy duty suspension, all that good stuff. I bought it after it had already been converted to T56 6-speed trans and 4.10:1 rear gears, so the previous owner saved me quite a bit of work there. It's primarily a daily driver and autocross car and I have done a LOT of work on the suspension. It's surprisingly nimble and fun to drive for a 4000+ pound sedan.

Way back in 1996, I started a project to build a 395" stroker LT1 for the Impala SS that I owned at the time. Many unrelated events and nearly thirteen years later, I am just finishing it up. In the meantime, a couple of really interesting things happened:

• Lots of Gen3 V8 vehicles were built
• A couple of companies created software to program them and they have become very well understood
• One company, EFI Connection developed the parts to properly run Gen1 and Gen2 small blocks with a Gen3 PCM. You can read about that here.

This post isn't so much informational as it is just a quick bit of background on my project. I am pretty excited about using the newer controller since the tuning software I have, HP Tuners, provides a lot of control. There are operating systems for the PCM that will let you tune in real time (as opposed to read, modify, flash, drive, modify, flash, etc), 2-bar, 3-bar as well as speed density.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to be finishing the engine up (it only needs a camshaft, coil mounting and some intake manifold fitting) and trying to get it installed in the car. It's going to be a pretty big project considering I only get to work in it a couple hours a night at the most. The next four months of miserable weather and mosquitoes here in south Florida won't be much help either.

As part of the engine project, the car is getting 1.75" full length headers, dual 3" exhaust all the way to the rear bumper, moving the PCM into the cabin, complete underhood rewiring starting with a 2006 Silverado underhood harness, degas tank deletion, battery in the trunk, rear coil-over shocks, carbon fiber driveshaft, new clutch and a trans rebuild.

More to come.

Linux and the Dell CERC ATA100/4ch

I have had an old Dell PowerEdge 600SC as a file/backup server that has one of these Dell-branded LSI 'raid' (I use the term loosely) cards running for years. It originally shipped with Red Hat 7 with a driver disk that allowed the use of the CERC card. It wasn't long before they dropped support for this hardware and the only way to utilize it under Linux was to compile it yourself. That being an ever increasingly painful process as Linux progressed and the CERC driver didn't, I pretty much ended up running Red Hat 8 on the machine until I decommissioned it a couple of months ago. It wasn't much of a problem since it was dead stable and I only lost a single hard drive in all the years it ran.

Now, I wanted to rebuild the old box with a shiny new OS and peddle it on eBay. Poking around a little uncovered that some folks have been getting this old raid card with a modern kernel. So, I thought, if they can do it, so can I. I rebuilt the machine with 4 partitions on the system drive (the one attached to the integrated controller). A boot, a swap and two system, a partitions gives the ability to test a second OS without mucking up the one you rely on.

Since the CERC card itself was recognized just fine, I thought it would be no problem to get the virtual drive online. Boy was I wrong. I had previously upgraded the firmware to the latest from Dell, which was published in like 2002, to get support for the 200Gb drives I had attached. No help there.

Then, I came across a single piece of information that I am going to republish here in case someone else is doing what I was trying to do and the original ever disappears. From here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2894899

I downloaded the 'incorrect' firmware directly from LSI:
http://www.lsi.com/files/support/rsa/N661.zip

Installed it to the card, and the OS magically recognized the virtual drive. It was really that easy, though it took a few hours to track down the solution. Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 Test 3 both work splendidly right out of the box with it.

Thanks slicksurf

First Ever Blog

This is my first ever entry into the blogspace. I never really imagined myself doing this, but lately I have been searching for very specific bits of information that have been less than easy to obtain. Ultimately, the information is all aggregated from various sources into a hopefully useful package. These sources are generally quite transient, whether they are forum posts, blogs, mail list archives, usenet, etc. I don't typically have a lot to say, but what I intend to post here are things that are useful to me that someone else might be looking for.

My interests vary widely across mechanical and technical genres, but are strongest around racing, race car construction, engineering, computers and Linux. One of my personal projects around the house is a pretty nice MythTV setup.

If you have read this much, you are even more uninteresting than me.