Help us help you. By posting the year, make, model and engine near the beginning of your help request, followed by the symptoms (no start, high idle, misfire etc.) Along with any prevalent Diagnostic Trouble Codes, aka DTCs, other forum members will be able to help you get to a solution more quickly and easily!
(Scope) All coils has influence on cam/crank signal
Hi all, Gonna get right into this interesting head scratcher.
2013 wrangler 3.6
Jeep shuts down after about 20 min of driving and the ETB light kicks on. The scan tool pulled a P061c which referes to RPM calculation error. I put a scope on the crank, cam signal and cylinder 1 primary ctrl wires and was surprised to see a 1.2v signal dropout to both sensors perfectly aligned with all 6 coil firings even though the cam/crank are on different 5v references. Same thing at the 5v ref itself and even on the PCM battery pos in wire. Interestingly though, this dropout seems to become almost non existent at the pcm fuse and just after exiting the fuse box. As of right now I don't have a screenshot of the scope sample but essentialy at the same moment a coil spikes up the voltage on the pcm drops 1.2v. So far the only improvement ive seen was when I grounded the pcm directly to the battery (but also still grounded to its original ground) which resulted in reducing the signal drop by 0.2v. So far there are no shorts on any coil wires found.
Could it be still a grounding issue or could this just be a bad PCM that just cant handle the coils anymore? I'd love to hear any ideas.
thank you.
I'll be able to get some images on Monday when I'm back at the shop.
So far I'm not convinced that noise is what I'm seeing since I've scoped on other 3.6ls before and adding more grounds to the pcm improved the signal, but I could be wrong since I've only been scoping for about 6 months.
I was thinking that this "signal drop" could be sending the pcm radical RPM changes due to the "dropout"s ability to split a square wave into 2 waves (at least at the top). Hopefully I'm not chasing my tail due to noise.