Intro/background
So as you may have seen the last few videos have been focussing on fuel mapping with the Power Commander.
Till now the videos have been focussed on the Power Commander V (PCV) since it’s the one I have, but it seems like the Power Commander FC (PCFC) and Power Commander 3 USB (PC3USB) are more widespread, perhaps due to their lower cost.
In the last video we went through the process of how I build a map for my bike using the PCV + the attached autotune box which links to a wideband O2 sensor to adjust the fuel map on the fly.
But as far as I could tell there was no way of doing that with the PCFC or PC3USB. They don’t have the onboard CAN bus (a messaging protocol which car devices use to talk to each other) so there’s no way to link them to a wideband, and if that’s not how you tune.. how *are* you meant to tune them?
Lots of people talk about “chuck a power commander on it and get a bit more power” (aka “Common Knowledge”) but I never found anyone willing to go into more detail on how to go about doing that in a slightly more scientific way, or why you should have one box over another. Or at least I couldn’t find anyone *who knew what they were talking about* who would do so.
Mechanics are often better at doing than explaining which doesn’t help feed this “pool of common knowledge”, and they arguably also have a financial incentive to not tell you how to DIY since that potentially deprives them of future business. That’s just capitalism though, and also not necessarily how my brain works, so here we are.
