Alright so I'm a complete noob with tuning and pcm's. I'm planning on buying a cable so I can monitor my engine performance and make sure everything is up to snuff with my car.

Is there an info page or somewhere with some general info for guys like me?
I know that there are some free programs out there, which ones are best? and what are the best ones that cost money?

Where do you plug it into the pcm and does it get removed from your car?

I've got a 1994 z28 and a Sony Vaio laptop with wondows 7 if that helps at all

 

You can buy the whole package from Tunercats now, including TTS Datamaster for logging data, Tunercats for programming PCM, and the cable you need. Look at the stickies in this forum and do some searching, it's loaded with lots of good info.

 

I started up using Solomon's site here LT1 PCM Tuning - Tips & Tricks for DIY Tuning! . Then had to do a lot more searching and reading after I knew what to look for. For very basic engine monitoring you could start off using FreeScan. FreeScan . It's basic, not as informative as TTS Datamaster, but it's free. Has not been updated on 9 years. You may need to run as administrator and possible install and run in XP mode, I'm not 100% sure.. Others on this forum have w/7 or Vista , they s/b able to help if you have problems..

 

Yeah i'm gonna staert slow and figure things out as i go. I bought the cable and I'm going to start using freescan. when i open freescan an error box pops up saying "the system cannot find the file specified" is this because i havent plugged it into my car yet?

 

It's because the COM port the cable is connected to is not the same one FreeScan is initially trying to connect to. Go to 3:04 in my video explaining how to use FreeScan (with my cable, but it's the same design as what you bought).

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So do you leave your computer plugged into your car and drive around and see what kind of readings you get? and i read that if a program gets interrupted while interacting with the pcm it could seriously f up the pcm

 

I have a 150 watt power inverter plugged into the cigarette adapter, then my laptop plugged into AC on the inverter whenever it is hooked up on the road. Theoretically you can only mess up the PCM bios code if the laptop fails during a code load (EG: Tunercats write to PCM) it should not mess up reading scan data with FreeScan or TTS Datamaster... However I never take the chance, and always run laptop on AC in the garage and on the road. Doing that you will use the laptop battery as backup if the AC should fail. Sort of a safety net..

 

Just datalogging is fine, no worries if there is an issue with the laptop, you only have to worry if it is writing to the pcm