My Megasquirt adventures over the years
I had an MS setup for a /6 that I sold years ago. If I hadn't sold it, I could see myself having gone down a similar path.
Curious if you have tried any of the auto-tune or self tuning features?
Oh yeah, I'm pretty deep into the ecosystem now, lol. I cracked and pretty much bought all the software upgrades at this point. Megalog Viewer HD (for autotuning from logs instead of live mostly), originally had the paid TunerStudio but semi-recently upgraded to the full Pro version. I don't recall everything that changed between them (I'm sure the website lists differences), but figured I mess with it enough and it's pretty cheap in the long run comparatively speaking. It's like, $300+ to buy the tuning software for SCT to tune my Viper, and I think that's still locked to just one car or one brand or something like that. I think all the EFI Analytics stuff combined is like, $120 for a package you can have on three computers at once and tune as many vehicles as you want with it (assuming I had any more to tune, lol).
I have used both the live and log based tuning quite a bit. It's handy, but there are caveats. Ideally, you still want your tables to be moderately close to start with. You want it to tweak things, not necessarily build them from scratch. I guess it probably can do that, as long as you can get the engine to run to start with, but it can lead to some pretty spiky tables. Maybe that doesn't matter, but in my head at least airflow shouldn't be changing that drastically from one cell to another, so I wouldn't think the tables values should either. It is kind of fun to watch it bring a table in and to see the AFR stabilize. The offline tuning is almost nicer to use in some regards. It has all the same functionality, but it's nice to be able to try out different filters on the same data to see how it wants to change things.
Maybe one of the most important things for the start of any tune is actually turning off the EGO, at least if you are tuning by hand. You can probably leave it on if you are running the auto-tune, but if you are tuning by hand and the EGO is pulling things all over the place, it's hard to see the effects of your change. I was looking at some datalogs someone else sent me that was having trouble getting his tune dialed in and one of the first things I noticed was the EGO correction swinging back and forth by huge chunks. In my eyes at least, the ultimate goal of any tune is to not need the O2 sensor to operate. It is for minor day to day variations and component wear, not necessarily primary control. In theory, you should only need to know things about what is going into the engine (air and fuel), not what is coming out, at least not once it is tuned.