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Hi, I'm a senior EE student & FSAE member at Lehigh University and I'm developing a controls system for our team's engine dyno stand. As part of our project, we have to generate a set of user specs via a market survey. If you guys wouldn't mind filling out a short survey (10 questions) about your teams dyno situation, I'd really appreciate it. If any of you have done this kind of thing before I'd also love to hear about your experiences.
https://surveymonkey.com/r/XZBY6PF
A survey is an interesting way for you to do research. Most people here prefer a public forum.
It is possible that you don't even need a dyno. Ever thought of that? If you have trouble tuning a custom engine setup, maybe you only need a timing light and maybe a air/fuel ratio sensor.
Dynos are nice because they let you do steady state sweeps which are difficult in the driving environment since the cars are just too fast to achieve high loads continuously in small testing areas.
Out of curiosity, what kind of dyno do you have (eddy current, water brake, big metal roller, etc.)? If you have an eddy current dyno you can be fancier about doing load sweeps to more closely simulate real world driving because their response time is very good (no physical momentum behind them).
The other thing I would suggest is having an analog display along with digital input/output blocks. Sliders and such are a pain to manipulate, but it is nice seeing a relativistic graphical display of the numbers entered (or conversely a numeric readout of an input for resolution and the graphical display for context).
This probably isn't directed towards you as the EE, but if you have good ventilation in the cell, tuning right next to the engine is not too bad. We usually wear ear plug and muffs and don't have much of an issue; the real problem is when exhaust fumes overwhelm the area.
Good luck! We designed out our dyno control system many years ago and both learned a ton and had a great time doing it! The suggestions above are from personal experiences. If I think of anything else I'll add it later!