Programming As I hinted at originally, this whole review series is revolving around the idea of making one high end gun fill various niches. The really appealing aspect of the Daystate electronic guns, is the fact that one gun has three power levels, and it takes no more than 10 seconds to switch between them. So, yes a RW costs a decent sum of money, but there's an argument there that it can take the place of three guns. For example, Centercut that won the Sportsman division of EBR last year, chose a Blue Wolf as his prize. He recently received that gun, and just started a thread today. He stated and explained the rationale behind his desired three power levels in the following manner: "approx 995 FPS on Medium power with the RD Monsters. On High, it shoots the JSB Beasts at 935 FPS.....on Low power, he tuned it for the 18.1 JSB at 880 FPS as per my request, since I shoot in a monthly 25M BR tournament at LDs Club, the Temecula Airgun Club." That works out to something like High-66, Med-56 fpe, and Low-31fpe, with his stated/desired pellets. That's a lot of versatility for one gun. I am not aware of any non-electronic gun that can go from 66 to 56 to 31fpe as effortlessly, and reliably, as the Daystate family of airguns.
I share Centercut's preferred power levels as an example that we all have specific uses in mind when envisioning how and where a gun will get used. He knew exactly what projectile he was interested in shooting at each power level and had a specific type of competition/use in mind. For most guns, it's such a hassle to swap power levels so drastically, that they end up being set-up at a certain point, and left there (one-trick pony). For myself, I do that mostly because I like the piece of mind of KNOWING the fps it is shooting is consistent. The mental game of having confidence in one's equipment is very important in certain shooting disciplines. For me in FT, if I'm feeling good about how a gun is shooting, I will shoot better scores. Constantly tinkering does not instill confidence, and most guns require a large amount of fiddling to get them from one power level to the next.
For myself, I knew before I ever had it in my hands that I wanted one of the power levels to be Field Target legal, so < 20fpe. After shooting it for a little over a week, I concluded that I was liking High at about 45fpe with the 25.39 Redesigns (will investigate High further with slugs), and Low at about 31fpe with the 18.1s. That left me with Medium as a here nor there power setting, at least for my specific uses and intent. After talking with the "Yoda of Red Wolf tuning" we decided to see if we could program it to make Medium be my FT power level, and leave Low and High right where they were.
Today I got serious about making some changes to the programming. Before I get into the details of what I did, here is a small intro to the idea behind it, or at least what I've thus far learned, sprinkled with my opinions.
If you have a specific use in mind and already know what power levels you want, and know that the factory settings don't provide that, the #1 recommendation from me is to pay your Daystate dealer to do the programming for you. I don't know what they charge, but for a gun costing this much, it's worth paying them do it. There are a couple of YouTube videos to help, but I'm fairly certain that I would have made a mess had I not taken advantage of the phone a friend option. Had I purchased this gun, and proceeded to mutilate the programming, it would have needed to have gone back to the dealer to be programmed anyway, costing shipping and the risk of getting broken in the mail. Most people that choose Daystate over other similarly priced air rifles are doing it because of Daystate's reputation of supplying a ready-to-go, high-performance level experience straight out of the box. Honestly, that right from the gates performance is a big part of what you're paying the premium Daystate price for. So, let the guys at the dealership bang their heads against the wall with the programming so that when you get it, you can slap a scope on it and enjoy the heck out of it, rather than being frustrated with trying to program it.
That being said, the programming is not impossible to accomplish for somebody motivated to take on the project. These two videos helped reinforce what I was being taught over the phone and through text. One is from one of the AOA technician that does a large amount of programming, and the other is from Michael, AGN forum owner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG3Y74va4TM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqBbDOYCju0
Those videos are very helpful, and I watched each one multiple times. In those videos, recording ALL the basic parameters is stressed numerous times, as it was to my by my ART friend on the phone. So, my #2 big recommendation if you ignored #1, RECORD EVERY FACTORY DEFAULT SETTING before messing with anything. My first potential problem, was that I didn't realize how many initial settings there were. I wrote down the settings from the Read/Store screens and thought I was good. There are actually 7 more screens for each of the three power levels that make up the settings for each fpe output.
(It's about to get pretty technical).
What helped me wrap my brain around it the most, was taking pictures of all the default settings with my phone, and then copy and pasting them together into one image. Like this:
Each column is a power level and the settings for that power level. DSP1=High=Profile 1. DSP2=Medium=Profile 2. DSP3=Low=Profile 3. I initially only recorded the top image in each column. My telephone instructor's first suggestion was to drop the voltage, circled in red. The first problem I had was that I dropped the voltage from the settings that were already in the programmer (circled in blue), which happened to come from a gun with at G1 cpu/board. Luckily he caught my error because this programmer I was using is his and he realized what I had done.
So, it's important to make sure that what you're looking at on the screen is the settings for the gun being tuned, and not something already in the programmer.
Once we figured that out and he gave me some other pointers, I was (mostly) on my own.
My next step was to see how much the voltage needed to come down from the G2 board factory setting of 63.26v. I ended up needing to bring it all the way down to 51.20v to get to my desired fps of about 810-815 with JSB 13.43, or right under 20fpe. I shot enough shots to bring the pressure down from 244 bar to about 190 and was seeing my fps taper off much too quickly. I realized I would have to jump all the way in the pool and change each of the parameters.
Pulse length is essentially dwell.
HS always has to be higher than LS. (Dunno why, but that's just how it is.)
Changes should be done in equal increments.
So, I changed all three pulse lengths (measured in microseconds), and the mid and low pressure points. I used the parameters I had, and the fpe they produced, to approximate what needed done to get about 30% lower than factory Low. I initially undershot by a vast amount and had shots in the 250fps range. I thought about it for a second and realized that the voltage was likely too low now, so I bumped the voltage back up to the 63.26 and was in the 650fps range. I then incrementally brought up the pulse pressures, and eventually fine-tuned the voltage back down a hair, to arrive at my goal fps of a little more than 800fps with my desired pellet.
Here is my scratch paper roughly showing what I did.
All of my changes can be summed up as studying the cause and effect relationship of the changes I was making. All of the above described programming took less than 2hrs. I spent the rest of the afternoon shooting and recording a 323 shot string. Yes, 323 shots from the Standard RW at 20ish fpe!
For this fun, the gun was left out of the stock and still hooked up to the programmer, like this:
323 shots: So, with how I have it programmed, I've got some creeping up of fps there in the last 1/4 of the string. The ES is too big. Though I do average under 20fpe, I've got some illegal shots in there.
Here's how 244 shots looks: Still have an ES that is too big, but all but one or two of my shots fit within that 2% variance in chronograph readings that are mentioned in the FT rule books, so, I'm legal here.
Here's how 219 shots look: (MAX on this one was 824.7-forgot to add it to the image)
ES is starting to be acceptable for FT use. I consider this string fully legal for FT.
Conclusion I don't think I'm going to call it done yet. It is a very good start, and I could stop around 165 bar and have 183 shots with a 20fps extreme spread. Just for the educational value, I think I'll try to keep fiddling and see if I can make it shoot over 300 shots within 25 or so feet per second.
That shot count is just sweet. No, a shooter will never need that many shots for a match, but man o man will it be nice to practice a little in the evening all week, 300 pellets worth, and never need to refill.
Just cuz, I shot all 323 shots from the string at a target at 53 yards. 25mph winds, no stock, many shots taken using my longest finger vs trigger finger, 6 year old scribe bumping the table.....
I'll eventually do some screen grabs of the final programming for the FT power level and share them here in the review. I'm thinking if I mess with ONLY the low pulse length I might flatten out that back end of the string where shots are climbing.
There's some ambiguity in the AOA programming video about incremental adjustments. I'm not sure if Don is saying that you cant change High without changing Low. But my instructor says that he has found each of the power levels to be completely independent of each other. He doesn't foresee the route I took here to be a problem, although I will verify High and Low fps after the tuning to see if my adjustments to Medium have had any effects there.
The first shot taken after making adjustments was always lower fps than the rest. Once I figured that out, it helped immensely. So, don't base future/potential changes on the first shot taken after changing a parameter.
My opinion of the programmer and the process is that it's a rather clunky endeavor. The programmer kinda seems like it was originally designed for something else, and repurposed for it's uses here. It's definitely no touch screen or OS operating with the newest version of Android, or bluetooth/wifi enabled tech. This is all hardwired old-school style. That being said, it does what it's supposed to do, which is give nearly infinite adjustability and tuning options for the Daystate electronic guns. Dealing with the seemingly aged tech of the controller is a worthwhile trade-off for what is ultimately accomplished.
The way I'm picturing programming, it's a one and done deal. Once the gun is programmed, it shouldn't need to be done again. Knowing that I will only have to do this once to get the gun right where I want it for the time that we'll spend together, worth the hassle.
(Jumping on the hype wagon a little here, sure has been bunches of it already.......after experiencing the programmer first hand and now sharing my somewhat candid take on it, I can see the excitement behind this Delta Wolf business. All the opportunities opened up by being able to program a gun to this level of exquisite detail, and being able to do it easily, and even share those settings to other shooters-at least I think I saw that advertised somewhere-yeah, game-changer.)
...
It may not be at max, but it sure is efficient as is.