Welcome to the HD and Off Highway section

Ask for and share advice on using the PicoScope kit to fix Heavy Duty and Off Highway machinery here
Post Reply
ben.martins
Pico Staff Member
Pico Staff Member
Posts: 539
Joined: Tue May 16, 2017 1:02 pm

Welcome to the HD and Off Highway section

Post by ben.martins »

Hello all,

Welcome to our new section! The purpose of this board is to have a place for those PicoScope users working on Heavy Duty and Off Highway machinery to discuss and share their knowledge with other like minded technicians.

This includes Medium to Heavy duty Vans, Trucks, Forklifts, Tractors, Construction Equipment and Industrial Engines.

I've found myself becoming more involved with these machines lately and appear to be doing less and less Automotive work but I know there are many technicians already out there using PicoScope on these vehicles.

I hope to be able to support those coming starting off with Pico and those that are more advanced to develop new techniques and better understand some of the systems we see to hopefully speed up the diagnostic process.

We live and learn together so please feel free to post questions or solutions and we can support each other.

Kind regards

Ben

mxx20
OneWave
OneWave
Posts: 15
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2020 8:03 pm

Re: Welcome to the HD and Off Highway section

Post by mxx20 »

Thanks, I think this is a great addition being from the medium and heavy duty industry. I'm trying to learn and not get overwhelmed lol.

ben.martins
Pico Staff Member
Pico Staff Member
Posts: 539
Joined: Tue May 16, 2017 1:02 pm

Re: Welcome to the HD and Off Highway section

Post by ben.martins »

Hi mxx20,

The main thing to remember is you are not alone. The Pico community is a strong one and we here to help each other.

The one thing I say to any new Pico user is capture waveforms on known good vehicles. It can be anything! Crankshaft and camshaft sensors, rail pressure sensors, injectors are some of the good ones to start with as this will not only build your confidence with using the scope, but also start building a known good library.

Setting up your startup settings will also mean you can get up and running quicker. We haven't quite finalized this in PS7 so I've attached a settings file which can be opened in either PS6 or PS7. This will set the timebase to 500ms/div or 5 seconds total time across the screen, switch on Channels A and B and set the voltage to +-50V and set the sample rate to 1MS. Depending on which software you are more familiar with this will automatically set your software to this so you can start capturing.

If you're ever in doubt don't be afraid to ask.

Kind regards

Ben
Attachments
Startup settings.pssettings
(4.3 KiB) Downloaded 519 times

jibby365
Newbie
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Jan 07, 2021 12:09 pm

Re: Welcome to the HD and Off Highway section

Post by jibby365 »

Hello 👋 I have been a dealership diesel tech since 2009. I bought my first pico about two years ago. I’ve run into many issues trying to understand what was going on in a waveform. I was lucky to have like vehicles to gather known goods for comparison. Although doing that only shows that there is a problem and not always what or where it is. I would love to get more in depth knowledge one certain systems. For instance a nox sensor drifted high fault Cummins says check power ground and data so I do that next step is replace nox sensor. Would be great to see the failure before replacing anything still kinda feels like swapnostics. I’ve attached a Cummins cm2350 Isb 6.7 running in cylinder capture. Comments are welcome
Attachments
E34C434A-3983-44E5-ABC7-11F57039B949.jpeg

ben.martins
Pico Staff Member
Pico Staff Member
Posts: 539
Joined: Tue May 16, 2017 1:02 pm

Re: Welcome to the HD and Off Highway section

Post by ben.martins »

Welcome to the forum jibby365!

Rest assured you are not alone with understanding what is good and what is bad and you've done the right thing in getting known good data to begin with. Scope diagnostics is split in half where 1st is the capture and 2nd is the analysis. There's no getting away from it but the 2nd part is the bit that takes the time and we learn something new everyday.

Having a good understanding of how a system works is usually the 1st step to analysis which being in dealer you should be able to draw upon technical information and your training to determine what should be happening and apply this to the waveform. Again, this doesn't happen overnight but looking at good signals will help with the understanding.

We all need help and the Pico community is there to support anyone that needs it, regardless of what you are working on or where you are the world. I try to share things I've found along the way by talking to technicians like yourself about how better to analyse waveforms and what else we could do to help with the diagnosis. This also means we can push new features in the software such as the recent inclusion on the J1939 decoder.

This decoder may actually be the one to help you with the NOx sensor issue you are seeing. There is a post in this section titled Smart Sensors were we pull apart the raw data captured with Pico, use the serial decoder to convert the data and then export to excel to graph this data. You could argue this is what the scan tool is doing but with different update times data can be off. By measuring directly at the sensor we can be sure the data we are seeing is the as what the ECU is seeing. Feel free to comment on that post and if you can share PSDATA files this will give us a chance to offer you quicker support.

Thank you for the in-cylinder capture. If this is from a known good vehicle then getting this into the waveform library will also help others out when a known good is required.

Kind regards

Ben

Post Reply