First gear works, second doesn't, engine dies.

[Razathorn]

First off -- this problem has been solved and it was no problem of k-pro's. I decided to post this up so people who have the same mysterious symptoms might benifit. So, hondata, here's one mysterious problem that would have fallen under the category of making sure the damn car works before you blame hondata ;).

I went to a friends house who got a k-pro in prep for going boosted with a CN turbo kit. I told him he should get familliar with k-pro while he was n/a and before he ran the ecu on a daily basis we would need to load up a good base calibration and make sure a/f and knock are good -- not wanting to do a full tune here. It was my intention to simply load up the coldair calibration, cleanup fuel and tune out knock. When we loaded up the calibration and went out for the first drive and datalog, the car worked fine in first gear, then shifting into second the car started sputtering, shaking, and popping. Starting, reversing, first gear, all worked. As soon as we got to second gear, things went down hill. Datalogs showed -27% short term fuel trim so I decided to throw it in open loop and see what was up -- the fuel shouldn't be off this bad. I also noted at this time that grounding wasn't moved to the engine head, so I did this also. Went back out, results were the same. Difference on this run was that the car started to struggle to stay running out of gear -- it looked like the iac was toast or something, and I started to think this was the case. We decided to try my k-pro to rule out his k-pro. Results were... not the same. Now the car wouldn't start.

At this time a giant light bulb from the sky came down and knocked us both out anime style as it dawned on me that the battery was probably toast. We swapped my battery in and the problem was gone. Swapped his k-pro in and the problem was gone. Seems that in first and reverse, the rpms are enough to keep ignition going via the charging system but second was too much.

So we went and got a new battery for his car and then cleaned up his calibration for daily use. Nice. Stupid battery. We were kinda freaked out for a while.

We ended up pulling out quite a bit of ignition out of this k20a2 from the coldair calibration in the normal areas you would have to (2-4k) and some WOT knock as well. Also ended up with a good 12.8 - 13.2 a/f in 3rd gear and did 5% first gear fuel comp and 2% second gear fuel comp to address spikes that we saw with a few launches through first and second gear.