That's not much out of range of what I see. Generally 280*C on the front cylinders and 50-100*C less on 7 & 8. But with the y-body hood design temperatures go way down with more idle time and having cooling fans running with the hood open. I've spent hours idling it in the garage both nose-in and nose-out, closing hood in between measuring and not closing hood. Measuring for 10-15 seconds per tube. It's just all over the place, especially when in closed loop with the integrators oscillating.
You make it sound easy. I would gladly buy you a round trip plane ticket just to see the look on your face afterwards. As good as I've ever gotten it, all it takes is a strong weather change or simply turning the A/C on to throw it all out the window.
My personal plan of attack would be:
0) Sorry to be a broken record but re-route the coil outputs away from the inputs if you haven't already. My suggestion is use temporary loom (i.e. the spiral wound stuff or just some electrical tape) on your wire bundles so they stay neat and separated. This will help prevent induced noise where an output wire may be in close proximity to an input wire (i.e. two wires laying directly against each other for several inches can create a pretty efficient coreless transformer in certain conditions).
1) Try running controller in parallel w/ stock ignition, firing all 8 coils to verify no issues driving all simultaneously. Make sure to have some dummy load / grounded plugs on them or you'll have an EMI circus going on under the hood. After engine comes up to temp restart and re-observe.
NOTE: Don't try jogging the starter trying to make coils "stick". Crank it to start and let it start. Then observe coil leds when running.
2) If step 1 successful try running with one LS coil driving a cylinder of your choice. Start engine and then disable that injector via eehack to confirm it's firing w/ correct sequence (i.e. if no RPM drop, it wasn't in sequence). At colder engine temps the RPM drop will be more pronounced. Do this both cold and at temperature. Test a start at temperature, repeating cylinder disable test. Considering your observation of kickback previously, you may want to repeat this test several times cold and hot, over several days. Again, if you're depending on the car for daily transportation, take as long as you need. I'd rather we fail miserably at this endeavor than have you fold a connecting rod.
3) If step 3 successful either gradually transition to all LS coils or go all at once, at your discretion. Use a cylinder balance test to verify all are hitting. If you have any difficulty starting that's not typical w/ distributor ignition stop and report back.
If at any point you have coil leds sticking after the engine is running stop and report back. Take logs of everything and be methodical with keeping track of what's what. If you have any issues I might give you some things to log periodically that could tell us more.
1 channel won't give you much to work with because you'll have no frame of reference. The uart data sent from the controller can be delayed by higher-priority interrupt handling, so it's not going to be close enough to real-time to be useful against a scope display. My suggestion would be to follow the above testing steps slowly and carefully. If I see anything that makes me believe there's a noise issue with the EST line I might be able to write some debugging hooks to help us troubleshoot. Today's been a wash so far so I haven't been able to make progress on my setup but I have very little reason to believe I won't be able to reproduce your sticking coils test. I just dread the thought of putting my starter through such torture.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll take a look once I have the main timing tables where I like them. I was able to confirm smooth engine function at 47 and 48 degrees advance, so my main question has been answered. I have no doubt 50-52 degrees is possible (though probably not needed).
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