Ultra gauge causing bad shifting?

[Barkleymut]

I bought the Saturn Vue in my sig a couple months ago. The second day that I owned it I plugged in my ultra gauge just to see all of the cool stuff the ultra gauge tells me. While going up a medium sized hill going about 35 mph the car went into 4th gear with a little thud and stayed there. I immediately shifted It to the manual mode and shifted into third.

My question is did the ultra gauge do anything to the shift points? I unplugged the UG and have not plugged it back in since. I want to use it again but am scared to because of this incident.

 

[Rand]

no. it has no functionality to change anything so it shouldn't.

that being said
There have been rare issues with it causing battery drain, and weird starting issues

You could test it a few times.. maybe yours is defective making something wack out?

 

[oldhp]

Unhook battery for 30min and then drive it like you would normally. The ECU will now learn how you drive.

 

[Barkleymut]

I have bought two used cars in the past two months and cannot believe that I didn't even think to unplug the battery. Will it unlearn the memory seats on my flex? Wife may kill me.

 

[redhat]

Hmm... I've been using an UltraGauge in my Accord for almost two years without any issues.

Some cars must not play nice.

 

[Barkleymut]

Red- I did not think it was the UG, but I wasn't going to take any chances.

 

[74DartSport]

Ultragauge in my 04 Sebring GTC w/SBEC & M/T after ~ 20 mins of driving causes a hiccup. Seems like it shuts the engine off for just a fraction of a second. Cruise disengages at the same time. My Scangauge does not do this.

 

[Wheel]

I think their documentation says if there are issues, you can change how often it polls the ecu,it's under 'page refresh time'

As the time is reduced, UltraGauge consumes more bus bandwidth requesting and
transferring data. As a result this setting should be used with caution. In many vehicles the OBDII port is connected to a
vehicle wide information bus. This bus is used by various vehicle modules to communicate. There is a finite bandwidth on the
bus and setting the refresh time smaller and smaller will consume more and more bandwidth to the point that it could impair
regular bus communication between system modules. This is especially true for 9141 and KWP2000 protocols, and to a lesser
degree J1850 and Ford Protocols. The CAN protocol has considerably more bandwidth than early protocols, however, there is
a good deal more communication on CAN equipped vehicles.

 

[Barkleymut]

Plugged the UG back in a few days ago and it ran with no problems. Then today it was back to its bad shifting self. Unplugged it while driving and had to wait for a while to pull over and restart the car. Once restarted it ran perfect again....I am not smart enough to decipher the post above this one...can anyone translate?

The Vue shifts way too early, it goes into fourth gear by 30 mph and almost slams into each gear when the Ug is plugged in.

 

[The_Eric]

The above post is suggesting that Ultra Gauge is taking up too much communications space (bandwidth) by refreshing too much (requiring updated info too often) and interrupting the regularly scheduled communications within the communication network.

Think of it as if you were speaking with someone via the telephone. You are the PCM and the other person is the transmission. Now, one of your kids (Ultra Gauge) is talking to you and asking questions all the time. What's going to happen? You're going to try to listen to your kid and talk to the other person at the same. Something is going to get lost. The other person will have a hard time conveying their message because the kid (Ultra Gauge) is taking your attention. Make sense?

 

[Barkleymut]

Sure does, thanks. So looks like I should try and make the refresh rate less frequent?

 

[The_Eric]

As per Wheel's suggestion, yes.