Caused myself a week of scratching my head, cussing and annoyance so figured I would bring this up. This is for anyone that has an Emanage Ultimate, like the Karcepts setup I have. This is not limited to just the Karcepts tune, but is related to the Emanage itself. You can jump below the bolded section for TL/DR

A few notes here. This may be a tad different if you bought one later than I did. I bought mine in 2016 from Karcepts because with the SCCA class rules for my class I could only run a piggyback, not standalone. It has been a good setup for years but just ran into an issue I figured I would save others from I know later units had added ground wires and an internal jumper that may avoid this issue, but that is not 100% confirmed.

My situation
Last season, started having some odd intermittent running issues. Started stalling at idle (was not IACV) every now and then a very brief intermittent miss at high rpm, etc. Over the winter, I had the injectors cleaned and they 100% needed that as they were flowing way below spec. I also had replaced my coil packs. Not because of this issue... the ones I had bought previously failed mechanically. Whole other thread on that one but not related at all to any of this! But noting that I have brand new Denso coils in the car.

This spring, I was doing a bunch of other work on the car, checking valves, putting in a race seat and harnesses. General pre track season maintenance. While I was at it, I made a mounting plate for the emanage. Since I put the roll bar in, it was zip tied to part of the bar because the plastic panel it was mounted to went away during roll bar install. But that was all I did to the car. But ... keep this part in mind

Took it out for a shakedown. Misses randomly throughout the 6k - 9k rpm range. Much worse than it was last year. Good fuel pressure, not finding anything else wrong.

I wanted to log some live data using my diagnostics tool and the piggyback can skew a lot of those readings. And I figured, lets just get the emanage out of the way and see how it looks running back on the stock ECU.... and it ran 100% perfect. Great, so now I'm thinking my piggyback or its boomslang harness has an issue. Tested it many times, back and forth. Runs poorly (even started missing at idle again) with the Emanage in the loop, perfect without.

I emailed Karcepts to see if Brian had any input on this issue or had seen it. And as is typical, his support was invaluable. I will always recommend them because of the support provided for the parts they sell. Great company. And this is what I learned...

OK, if you wanted to do the TL/DR thing, this is where you jump in to get the basics.

Along the way, they added a separate ground lead to the harnesses for these. Mine did not have that, but they had recognized some issues due to grounding. This can be added to old units by tapping into the black and black/red wire (look that up if you plan to do it) but mine did not have it and I was not aware of that back when I installed mine. They also added an internal jumper as well to address some issues. I cant say if the fix below for mine is no longer needed with the later units but I believe it is still recommended.

My fix? Dont mount the emanage to anything metal What I had first done was zip tie to the roll bar temporarilly. That is painted/powdercoated but there is also a bolt it was touching that would have given some connection to ground. Note How mine kinda of acted up last season and then got worse this year? Well over winter I made that nice metal mounting plate to make it more secure. The unit is screwed into that and part of it is bolted to the chassis. This was 100% my issue. After hearing back from Brian and lying the unit in the seat, it ran perfect again. I went back and added rubber sheet to my mounting plate and attached the unit to it for now with big zip ties (will try to get some plastic screws later) and tested again and it was perfect.

So long story short, dont mount the unit to metal. This likely was called out much more in later versions documentation and instructions since these sort of issues had been discovered and some changes had been made. But since mine was earlier (and I was mounting to the location the harness was meant to reach which was the plastic panel behind the seat) I had no reason to know about this. So years later when I was remounting it I created the issue! Simple thing that caused a good amount of cussing and irritation this week!

 

yup! can never mount on metal. biggest culprit to failure, besides water