Launch Control: Software Walkthrough
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Software Walkthrough
08.21
| 00:00 | - For this worked example, we're going to look at the launch control setup and tuning on the MoTeC M1 ECU. |
| 00:08 | For our worked example, we're using the M150 ECU with the Toyota FT86 package. |
| 00:16 | This will also be applicable to anyone using the MoTeC M1 with the GPR, or General Purpose Race package in it, or, for that matter, any of the other OE packages that include the race functions. |
| 00:32 | For a start, what I'm going to do is just talk you through the software, the various setups we've got to look at, just so you're familiar with the layout of the M1 software and M1 tune, and you know what we're going to be looking at. |
| 00:46 | There are a few different worksheets we're going to look at. |
| 00:50 | We're going to actually start with our setup, which we find in the vehicle workbook, and the one we're going to be looking at here is our wheel speed. |
| 01:01 | Now, all of the launch control functionality in the M1 ECU is based off wheel speed, so that's the first key point. |
| 01:08 | We're not working off a clutch switch, which we can in some ECUs. |
| 01:12 | Everything is based on ground speed or driven wheel speed. |
| 01:17 | So it's really important to start with that we get the input for the wheel speed correct into the ECU, and on the wheel speed worksheet we can set all of that up, so we have our front wheel speeds and our rear wheel speeds and we can move through and look at all of the options available in there. |
| 01:36 | Now, we've kind of shortchanged everything here with the Toyota 86 package, because we're lucky that all of the wheel speeds are being input via CAN straight from the ABS computer. |
| 01:48 | And it's going to be quite common on a lot of the M1 OE packages, so it's easy, we don't actually have to set anything up, because it's all configured for us. |
| 01:56 | We don't have to wire up any sensors, but I'll just talk you through how we could go about that. |
| 02:02 | Obviously, we have the front and rear wheel speed sensors, you can configure the drive speed as well, if it's a rear wheel drive or front wheel drive car, and in this particular situation, one of the things I did need to change was our final drive ratio, as we've gone from a 4.1, which is the factory ratio, to a 4.55 final drive. |
| 02:27 | Now, when we're actually looking at the individual wheel speeds, we've got the left rear speed here, and you can see if I click on the CAN option, we've got that coming in over CAN slot OE3, which is one of the OE inputs, so as I said, we don't need to actually do anything with that particular input, however, if we were wiring it through a sensor, then we have the usual inputs here, which would be basically the same as any other input that we're setting up in the MoTeC M1. |
| 02:59 | And if you're not familiar with this, we do have more information on how to configure an input in our M1 software tutorial, so you can have a look at that. |
| 03:08 | The first part of the setup is to make sure we've got all of these wheel speeds coming in and the ECU is reading those. |
| 03:16 | So this is the first setup worksheet. |
| 03:19 | We'll actually move through, and we'll go into our race functions workbook, which is where we've got the launch control worksheet, which you can see we've got here. |
| 03:28 | And again, we'll look at the different options that are available in here, we'll just shrink everything down for a start. |
| 03:36 | We've got the ability to turn the launch control system on, and if we want to, we can also use a multi-position switch to map different positions, so we can alter the launch control parameters, the launch control functionality, using either an on/off switch or a 9-position switch, so we can adjust the launch control parameters to suit track conditions, or we can turn the launch control functionality on and off completely. |
| 04:05 | Then we've got our launch control, we've got our main enable for the whole system, so this is where we turn our launch control function on or off in the software. |
| 04:16 | So we can do this, and then we can still control what it's doing with a switch, but this is where we actually enable the entire function. |
| 04:24 | We move down, we've got some functions for activating or when the launch control system can be active. |
| 04:31 | We've got an exhaust temperature and a coolant temperature lockout. |
| 04:35 | Now, if we leave both of these set at zero, what it's going to do is ignore those inputs, but if, for example, we want to set a threshold for either exhaust gas temperature, if we've got a sensor configured, or coolant temperature above which we don't want launch control to become active, we can set those in these two positions here. |
| 04:57 | Next, if we move down, we've got our entry conditions, and this is the throttle position above which we need to go to to make the launch control function active. |
| 05:12 | In this case you can see we've got that set to 70%, so the launch control will become active any time any time the car is stationary and the driver goes above 70% throttle. |
| 05:24 | We also have an exit strategy here, which is, when the throttle position is below 4%, the launch control function will be disabled, we'll exit that. |
| 05:35 | We've got some controls for our ignition timing, which we're going to talk about when we actually move into the tuning part, but we can control a target ignition timing under launch control, and from the body of the course you remember this can be useful if we want to retard the timing in order to spool up a large turbo. |
| 05:52 | We'll talk about that when we get into the actual tuning. |
| 05:56 | Next we move into our engine speed. |
| 05:59 | This is our target table, if you like, of engine speed, and you can see, if I just F6 and make this larger, you can see we have a 3D table. |
| 06:10 | On the vertical axis here, we've got our load position, which comes from our multi-position switch, and then we've got our ground speed on the horizontal axis. |
| 06:22 | We've got a margin, which you can see here. |
| 06:25 | Now, the margin is like a control range on our rev limiter, which is what's functioning for our launch control here, and what that's going to do is give us a control range over which the rev limit becomes active. |
| 06:39 | So what happens is, in this instance, say we've got 3000 RPM set as our launch RPM. |
| 06:46 | The limiter action will begin at 3000 RPM, and it will get to a point where, if we get above our launch control RPM by the margin, in this case 50 RPM, so 3050 RPM, at that point, the limiter will become 100%, so it's progressively increasing from our launch RPM across the range of our margin. |
| 07:10 | That is something we'll talk about once we start looking at the tuning. |
| 07:13 | It is something that you can tune and adjust to suit different engines. |
| 07:18 | We've also got the ability to trim the fuel volume so we can adjust the amount of fuel being delivered while we're on launch control. |
| 07:27 | As a default, this is set to zero, and if we highlight that and press the A key, we can enable the vehicle speed axis if we want, so that we can control the amount of fuel being delivered relative to ground speed. |
| 07:40 | Personally, I don't find that strictly necessary in most instances. |
| 07:44 | Likewise, we've got the ability to adjust the electronic throttle body's opening, as we've discussed in the body of the course, and of course we've got the ability to control our boost target while we're on launch control. |
| 07:57 | So this is the main area we're going to be working in to tune our launch control, and we'll be making use of our time graph down here on the bottom right to help us tune the launch control function. |
| 08:12 | So that gives you a quick rundown of the software. |
| 08:15 | Now we'll move on, and we'll start looking at how we can configure and tune it. |
