Decided it was about time I got one of these myself, as I'm constantly tinkering with the Emerald and it'd be nice to have some proper feedback to see if it's having the right effect... Hiscot pointed me in the direction of the PLX stuff, after my rant about the Innovate LC1 - based on my personal experience and others that I know had with them. Great company to deal with - sent over from the states no problem (no UK distributor) - http://www.plxdevices.com They also do some really cool OLED based gauges - which you can completely customise, but they were expensive and probably a bit Fast & Furious, so I went for the basic DM5 wideband gauge, which does the job admirably.
Fitting was actually a piece of cake (for once) Wiring isn't complicated - you need a switched +12v and ground near the ECU, so I simply spliced into those feeds just back from the ECU plug (suited where I was positioning it) A third line is connected to the #2 Aux in on the Emerald (with a noise-filtering capacitor running between it and the ground - supplied also). The gauge is pre-wired for AFR reading (can also read Lambda) and the cabling just needed extending to run from the dash to the back of the engine bay. The controller itself is a shiny wee red anodised ally box - very clever as it can be daisy chained (along with the dials) and there are multiple modules available - ranging from coolant temp to EGT. There's a good length of loom that connects to the (supplied) Bosch sensor. In the box, I got enough cable and accessories to make sure I'd be able to install it anywhere with all the options, without having to source anything else. I really like when companies do this - I get the impression they care a bit more about the user experience than pinching pennies, which counts for a lot with me
How much for all this? Just over £200 when you take shipping and import taxes into consideration - for a product that (IMO) is in a different league of quality from the LC1, which wouldn't be much cheaper when bought with a display. Happy Shug
First reports are very good - quickly warms up and is showing logical numbers. It requires no calibration, so it's really plug in and start mapping. Setting up the voltage/AFR in the Emerald datalogger takes about a minute and then you're running with logs of load sites, speed sites and AFR on a single graph within minutes.
Of course, the new K3 Emerald can automatically adjust the maps to match AFR targets in each load site, so mine will be going for upgrade (for a very reasonable 50 notes) just as soon as one of my other sheds gets some tax on it to cover the week or so that the Emerald will be away.
