Spoken Warnings
Have the app tell you out loud when something goes wrong while you are recording
When you are recording a log the interesting things happen away from the laptop. You are under the bonnet with a torch, or in the driver's seat, or standing beside a dyno with the engine at five thousand. Nobody is reading the screen — which is exactly when the coolant goes to 112, or the ECU starts pulling timing.
So GTS can watch for those things itself and say them out loud: a short tone to turn your head, then the warning in words — "Knock detected", "Coolant temperature high, 112 degrees", "Oil pressure low, 90 kPa".
Turning it on
It is on by default. The switch is on the Live Data tab of the ECU Connection page, next to the Start buttons: a Spoken warnings tick box and a Choose warnings… button. The tick box is remembered between sessions, and the line beside it says how many warnings are armed — or, once a stream is running, what is currently wrong.
Warnings run for a watch as well as a recording. They owe nothing to a file being written: if the stream is on and the engine is running, they are looking.
What it watches
Thirteen things, each of which can be switched on or off on its own, and most of which have a limit you can move:
| Warning | What it means |
|---|---|
| Knock | The ECU is pulling ignition timing because it heard knock |
| Oil pressure low | Oil pressure below the limit while the engine is pulling |
| Coolant temperature high | Coolant over the limit for long enough to be real |
| Mixture lean under load | AFR above the limit with the throttle open |
| Injector duty high | The injectors are running out of time to deliver the fuel |
| Intake air temperature high | Charge temperature high enough to cost you timing |
| Oil temperature high | Oil over the limit for long enough to be real |
| Fuel pressure low | Fuel pressure below the limit while the engine is pulling |
| Battery voltage low | Not charging, or charging too slowly, with the engine running |
| Charging voltage high | Overcharging — hard on the coils and the ECU alike |
| Lost sync | The ECU lost the crank or cam signal |
| Overboost | The ECU's own boost protection has tripped |
| Rev limiter | The limiter is cutting. Off by default — it is not a fault |
Why it does not shout at you
A warning you switch off within a mile is worse than no warning at all, because when the real one comes you will have switched it off. Four rules keep these worth listening to:
- A reading has to persist. At ten samples a second a noisy channel crosses any limit constantly. Each warning has its own dwell — a couple of seconds for coolant, five for battery voltage (a fan or a fuel pump starting drops it below 12.5 V on a car that is charging perfectly well), none at all for a knock event, which is over before it could dwell.
- Most warnings are gated on something else. AFR pegs lean on every overrun, because the ECU has cut the fuel — that is not a lean engine, so the lean warning only speaks above 20% throttle. Temperature and voltage warnings only speak with the engine running. Oil pressure is asked only above 1200 rpm, because low pressure at a hot idle is normal.
- It says a thing once. A warning that is still true repeats every thirty seconds, so you hear it again if you missed it — but it does not repeat per sample, and a value dithering across its limit is one event, not a dozen.
- Nothing is announced in the first five seconds of a stream, while every channel is still settling. If a condition is still true when that window closes, it is announced then — an engine that was already too hot when you pressed Record is exactly what you want telling about.
On the screen as well
The voice is for the moment it happens. The strip across the top of the window is for the moment you come back to the laptop: it names what is wrong and shows the reading, on whatever page you happen to be on, and it does not go away by itself while the problem lasts.
It is red for anything critical, amber otherwise, and it keeps showing the current reading rather than the one from when it first fired — so walking back to the car and looking at the screen tells you where things stand now. When several things are wrong at once it says how many and lists them.
Once everything has cleared it goes grey, says so, and stays up for one more minute still showing what happened and how bad it got. That minute is the whole point: the warning fired while you were under the bonnet, and a strip that vanished the moment the coolant came back down would only ever be seen by somebody who was already watching the screen.
Dismiss takes it down now. What happened? opens the list below.
The list of what has happened
Every warning that has actually fired is written down and kept — between captures, and between sessions of the app. Open it from What happened? on the strip, from Help → Warnings While Logging..., or from the What happened tab of Choose warnings....
One row per episode, not per announcement: coolant that stayed high for twenty minutes and was spoken six times is one row, and the row says the worst it reached, how long it lasted and how many times it was said. Newest first.
| Column | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| When | The time it started. Today shows a time; anything older shows the date too. |
| Warning | What it was. Critical ones are picked out in red. |
| Worst | The furthest it went — 131 degrees, 17.5 to one. |
| Lasted | How long the condition was true, or still going. |
| Said | How many times it was announced. |
Hovering a row names the recording it happened during, so you can go back to that log and find the moment. Copy puts the whole list on the clipboard as text, which is the quickest way to tell your tuner what the car did. Clear the list throws it away — it asks first, and it does not change which warnings are switched on.
Choosing which ones you want
Choose warnings… opens a list with a tick box, the condition in plain words, the limit as an editable number and a Test button against each one. Press Test and that warning is spoken immediately, which is how you set the volume before you need it rather than after.
A warning whose channel your ECU does not report is greyed out and says so. Not every board has an oil pressure or fuel pressure input, and a warning that could never fire should not be sitting there ticked looking like it is watching. Switching ECUs later does not lose anything: those rows come back by themselves on a board that reports them.
Four of the limits — coolant, minimum and maximum battery voltage, and the lean threshold — are the same numbers the Log Warnings settings use for analysing a finished log. Changing one here changes it there, on purpose: it is one statement about one engine, and two numbers that could drift apart would be worse than one.
The voice
The words are spoken by a Windows voice that is already installed on your machine, and nothing here needs an internet connection — which matters, because the place you most want a warning is often a workshop with no signal.
If your machine has no speech voice at all, warnings still beep: a short tone for a warning, and a higher one held more than twice as long for anything critical — so you can tell how serious it is before the words arrive, or without them. The dialog tells you which of the two you are getting. You can also turn the speech off and keep the beep, or the other way round, in Settings → Live Warnings, along with the volume.
Where the numbers go
Everything that is announced is also written to the activity log on the ECU Connection page, with the reading that triggered it, and to the list above. The spoken sentence carries the number only where the number changes what you would do — 104 degrees and 118 degrees are different situations, where a knock event has no number worth a second and a half of speech.