Make Your RX 8 More Reliable and Drive Better With This Mod

G'day and thanks for joining me. Today, I've got an RX-8 Nexus plug-in ECU. I've got a 2004 Series 1 manual RX-8. I'll be installing this ECU, running through the wizard and getting her up and running, ready to tune. Installing the ECU doesn't require a lot of complicated tools. We're gonna need a 10 millimeter ratchet. We're gonna need a small flat blade screwdriver to be able to pick open the ECU enclosure. And we're gonna need a Phillips head screwdriver to put the brackets onto the Nexus plug-in. So we've undone the three 10 millimeter bolts that were holding the cover onto the ECU enclosure. And inside here is the factory ECU. Little bit different to some other manufacturers. This one's actually got an air duct inside that sits over the top of it, that puts cool air over the ECU. Pretty good idea considering it is mounted in the engine bay. Little bit tricky to get it out though. So there is a process where we need to take the two Phillips head screws off one side here and this bracket will pop off. Then we take the three 10 millimeter bolts out and it is a little bit tricky. We do need to kind of work it out of there. No need to undo anything else. You can get it out in one piece. So to get a bit of leverage on everything, I'm just gonna knock out these three, one. And the next bit, this is where it gets just a tiny little bit fiddly. So once we can sort of pull the ECU up just a little bit, I don't wanna put any pressure on the wiring harness, but I'm gonna grab my Phillips head screwdriver. I'm just gonna pop this bracket off this side. This bracket will pop off and that's not gonna be reused, that one. Then that'll allow us to get a little bit of leverage to be able to pop everything up here. Flat blade screwdriver or something like that. So I've just got this little one. If I just come down the side here, a little clip, one clip, two clips. Now we're in a position where, the wiring harness off that, we're away. Pop those ECU connectors out and there we have it. So that's the part I'm talking about that brings the air in and sits over the top of the ECU to keep it cool. Get our ECU connectors up and have a quick visual inspection. Everything's nice and clean and nice and tidy. So now we're ready to install our Nexus plug-in ECU. I'll go and grab it. Okay, so I've already fitted the bracket to this in the RX-8 unboxing video. If you haven't seen that, there's a link in the comments. Check that one out and then come straight back to us here. Not too much to note to be honest, but we'll put a closeup of this so you can see where the brackets sit. Pay particular attention that the up section of this bracket here is in line with ECU connectors. Three screws down one side, two down the other. We'll gently sit that in and it should line right up. I like to plug the ECU in before it's bolted down because I find that it makes it a whole lot easier. In preparation for getting this thing on the dyno and getting the Nexus plug-in in there and to save a whole heap of time, I did have it on the hoist and I've already fitted an LSU 4.9 oxygen sensor. That's an optional extra. You don't have to do that, but I would highly recommend it. Once it's done, you can pull the harness up on the driver's side of the engine. You can get up and through nice and neat into these beautiful AMP one millimeter super seals. There are oxygen sensor pins. We'll jam that in and that's it. She's got onboard O2, how beautiful. The next thing that we need to do is fit a vacuum hose. This is necessary. You must fit a vacuum hose to your RX-8 ECU. We do not do any tuning of the airflow meter. All of the tuning is using the volumetric efficiency method. All of the tuning is map referenced. So the manifold pressure reference on this one, the kit is supplied with a vacuum hose and a T-piece. We look down here, we'll find a vacuum port that I'm just gonna point to there. So I like to fit the T-piece here and then bring our vacuum hose around the back of the engine, nice and tight. There's no real sort of particular way to put it. As long as it's out of the way, it's not near anything hot and making sure that it's as short as run as possible and there's no potential for that hose to get kinked. Before we put the airbox back on the top of the ECU, I'm just gonna plug in our USB-C cable, nice and tight. There we go. And keeping in mind that once we've gone online with the laptop and we've done the startup wizard, we'll set the Wi-Fi password for the ECU so then in the future, you can program it via Wi-Fi so you don't need to have the USB cable in there all the time. Here's a handy hint, if you've got your car on the dyno and we've got the front wheels stationary but the rear wheels are spinning, a lot of late model ABS units will get a little bit cranky. So you've got a couple of options. You can press the ABS button or the traction control button and disable it, doesn't work all the time. You can press and hold that button for 10 seconds to disable the stability control and the ABS, doesn't work all the time. You can Google it and find the magic press the brake, pull the handbrake, do this, do that, on, off, keys on, off to try and disable it and put it into a diagnostic mode or a limp mode. Or some cars like this one, if we slide right in there, I'm just gonna unplug the ABS while it's on the dyno. Yes, we will have a few lights on the dash, we won't get our CAN based wheel speed sensors into the ECU because they're coming through the ABS unit but it means that we won't have any stability control while it's sitting on the dyno. Handy little hint, works on the Mazda RX-8, could work on a lot of late model cars. And now it's the fun part, we get to jump in, use the wizard and get the thing up and running. You could do all of this from outside and you could stand outside in the sun with your laptop but we are gonna have to calibrate the electronic throttle so that means we are gonna have to operate the throttle pedal. So I might as well sit in here in comfort. I've got my USB cable plugged into my laptop, I've got the NSP software installed. I'm gonna open that up, I have not turned on the ignition for the car. The laptop will communicate with the ECU via the communications cable, no need to power it up just yet. So she's going online and here we go, the exciting part begins. Enable the wireless, I am going to enable this as Blue RX-8, password, look away for a sec. Apply SSID and password, so that's what that's gonna do is apply that to the ECU. It's also gonna set up a Wi-Fi network for your laptop so the next time that you're in range of this, it's gonna go online and away you go so you don't need to go to your Wi-Fi devices to figure any of that stuff out. Vehicle name, I'm gonna call this Blue. Stock RX-8, it's an Australian delivered six port. Now there is one of them there, four port to six port, I'm gonna put a screenshot as well to show you the difference between the four port and the six port engine and particularly on the inlet manifold where you can figure out whether you've got a four port or a six port. Our auxiliary harness has got our wide band, it uses the six port engine, it's drive by wire with the RX-8 and it's got stock porting. So you'll notice here that I'm clicking through fairly quickly because all of the defaults are already configured so if it's a stock car, within reason, we click through. So primary red injectors for a series one, yep, stock. Second option, and it's gonna choose our secondaries are yellow, yep, correct. And our tertiaries, also the yellows, beautiful. It's got the RX-8 ignition coils, yep, beautiful and it's already pre-selected the correct ones. Everything's there, that all looks pretty good to me, we're gonna go to complete and here we go. Turn on the ignition to do the startup, okay. We've tested everything, I've gotta go outside and plug in my air temperature sensor it tells me there so okay, I'll go next. Calibrate the throttle, set zero position, okay. Hold it at 100%, calibrate. Beautiful, brake pedal, on, off, on, off, looking good to me, beautiful. Check the fuel pump, I can hear it turning on and off, yes. High speed, I can hear it that it was actually louder, perfect, thermo fan one, slow, fast, yes, yes, all right. Now once we've run through the entire wizard, it boots us back into the NSP software that anyone who's used the Haltech ECU before would recognize. If you haven't, it's quite straightforward. Down the left-hand side of the page, we've got all of our menu structure. On the right-hand side of the page, we've got all of our displays, all of our 2D, our 3D mapping, all of our text views and our trace views, so whatever we need to do. But from here, all we need to do is hit the key, she's gonna be up and running. From there, we can drive the car to the tuners, get it on the dyno, get that tune into it and get the most out of your RX-8. So here we go. And she's running and she's away. This is kind of what we're expecting out of the system in the way of the wizard working. So the wizard's setting all of those things up so we know exactly what ignition coils we've got, we know exactly which engine it is, we know exactly what size injectors it's got. As long as we've got our O2 sensor in there, all of our long-terms are turned on, the longer the engine runs for, the better the idle quality is gonna get and the better the air-to-fuel ratios are gonna get. And remembering what I always say, it's hardest to make that first 100 kilowatts and that includes the startup. It's a plug-in ECU, so all the inputs and outputs are configured, all the triggering systems, all the ignition information. When we hit the key, this thing starts, it runs, it idles using that beautiful electronic throttle body. That means that half the battle is already won. But there is still the part that I enjoy the most and that is sitting on the dyno and that is extracting the most amount of torque we can across all of the load references and across all of the RPM references. So that's what I'll be doing for the rest of the afternoon. Thanks very much for watching. My name's Scott. Catch you next time.