Passing inspection with Megasquirt?
 

I used to live in PA and had to deal with inspection and emissions in my county (Allegheny). I purchased my cars stock and had them inspected as one normally would the first year. After that first test I just made sure that the odometer in the car at the time of inspection showed less than 5000 miles so I could utilize the 5000 mile emissions testing exemption. My shop never gave me a problem with the visual aspect even with the typical MS powered turbo setup as seen here on MT and catless exhaust.

I assume you live in an emissions county so you'll need to have the factory ecu running the car. Can you just pull the belt off the s/c and drive it NA with the stock ecu (assuming the shop isn't picky on visuals)? Most OBDII ecu's will show test ready within 30-50 miles of driving in my experience.

Buying the car from VA so have to have it inspected for at least year one. So with just swapping out the MS for stock ECU will I be good to go for inspection or will I also have to put stock injectors back in? It has 525cc in it.

Yes you'll have to reinstall all the factory items a stock ecu would need such as the injectors, maf, narrowband O2 sensor, evap parts, etc. PA still requires annual safety statewide as far as I know.

Too much work. I'll keep shopping

What county are you trying to get inspected in?

Chester. As a last ditch effort, I'll call DMV Tuesday & see if I could get classic plates for it.

Every year, since I moved to GA, I go through the same annual ritual;
- swap out the larger injectors for stockers
- wire open the WG
- flip a switch and use the standard IAT sensor (instead of the GM sensor in the IC tank)
- swap over the connectors from the MS and connect them to the stock ECU
- wire the NBO2 sensors back into the harness (a matter of switching a connector)
- plug the EGR back into the harness
- (and new for this year) swap out the GM coils for the stock coils
- go through a week of trying to get the Readiness Monitors to go green (and usually finding some stupid glitch that needs repairing before that happens)

Then I get the "Inspection Certificate", get re-registered and reverse the whole process.

Is it a pain in the a$$? Yes.
Is it worth the trouble? Yes.

I say all of that to say this; I find it strange that people want a non-standard (i.e. turbocharged, or supercharged) Miata, and don't want to endure some "pain" along the way. For me, a few hours wrenching in the garage (which I enjoy) and a week of non-turbo driving is a very small price to pay.

IJS...

Reading this thread made me realize that maybe Michigan isnt that bad after all...
Our roads suck but no inspections appears to be the tradeoff

Yeah, I moved from DTW to ATL - that first year of registration was an "adjustment".

Will a modified car fail inspection in PA? So long as you dont need odb-ii, i dont see why it would fail an inspection. I mean you have a SC...the MS add an AIT and vacuum hose in the engine bay.

Some PA counties check emissions and yes if it's '96 and up it gets plugged in to check for codes and readiness. They are supposed to do a visual as well to check things like egr, cat, evap system. They had tailpipe tests (and even dynos in some areas) for pre obdii cars but I don't know if they still use them.

if it needs emissions, the MS must come out -- run it on a stock computer after passing checks.

if it just needs a visual inspection, the MS matters very very little.

I'm really waiting for the entrepreneuring chinese to make a fake OBDII port that you can program with your vin and just reads ready all constantly.

Some of our Megasquirts do have full OBD-II functionality nowadays, but we don't have a 96-97 model that has OBD-II I'm afraid.

I'm sure that the EPA would be happy to see that happen (and, considering the current political environment, that may be a truer statement than I expected).

One of the latest variants actually uses all the emissions equipment, checks if they work as intended, and if they do and no CELs are present, the readiness monitors are set, otherwise they are cleared. I have an EGR stepper on my bench as I'm typing this, writing the code that checks the coils.

I was going off of old information then. Wow.. how is that even legal?

Its not in the US. If MSLabs was us based in the USA, then EPA would probably come down hard. Its happened to a few companies who have messed with obdII and none ended up existing afterwards.