tbichips.com (Brian Harris). Useful or Not?

[dave w]

You will need a Moates.net G1 adapter board, see attached picture.

dave w

[Six_Shooter]

Just to say it explicitly. You don't need the laptop connected to the emulator to run the engine. The bin file is loaded to the Ostrich and is read by the ECM from it, even without a laptop connected to the Ostrich 2.0.

The Emulation allows real time tuning to happen which is a great thing.

I have 4 (I think) Ostrich 2.0s now, one is installed in my car, one is in my tuning bag, and the others are back ups, or when I want to use one on my test bench, or leave one in a friend's car for a few days. I also have an AutoProm, Burn2, ALDL Xtreme, among other Moates tuning equipment.

As far as what to buy, that's a personal choice. I started with an ALDL Xtreme and Ostrich 2.0, since I already had an old programmer at the time. If you don't have anything, and you don't plan to leave the emulator in the vehicle, then an AutoProm is a great choice to have all in one capability, single cable to the laptop solution that has extra inputs to log signals that are not in the ALDL datastream. This is my go to piece when I'm tuning other people's cars. If you plan to leave the emulator in the vehicle, I would suggest the Ostrich 2.0, simply because it's a lot smaller and seems like it would handle the heat cycles and moisture better than the AutoProm, though this is really based on my dislike of leaving complex devices in such an environment. If you need to log extra signals, such as a WBO2, because you are using an ECM that is not possible or difficult to get that info through the ECM inputs, then the AutoProm makes sense here regardless.

There are people that have gone the Ostrich 2.0 and ALDL Xtreme, without a programmer and simply downloaded their BIN file or one close from a source, like gearhead-efi.com and used the emulator indefinitely. Personally I like to have the option of programming an EEPROM just in case.

What ever way you decide, you can't go wrong with Moates equipment.