Practical Reflash Tuning: Step 5-C: Steady State Tuning and Live Tuning
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Step 5-C: Steady State Tuning and Live Tuning
27.29
| 00:00 | - Typically when we're tuning a system such as the Hondata K Pro which is based around a factory ECU, we're going to be making our changes by reflashing. |
| 00:10 | So this is where we are making our changes offline and then uploading them through to the ECU as we've already seen during this worked example. |
| 00:17 | Now this works fine when we're doing wide open throttle ramp runs because we're not making tuning changes during the ramp run. |
| 00:24 | However this does make it a little bit more tricky for us to perform any steady state tuning so this is where we would be adjusting our fuel, ignition, and cam targets in the cruise area or transition areas of our map. |
| 00:39 | Now in a lot of ways this isn't a big concern for us when we are tuning using the K Pro platform. |
| 00:45 | Particularly when we've got a stock engine such as the one we're tuning here with just some light modifications. |
| 00:51 | The part throttle areas of the mapping often are going to be very very close, and particularly when it comes to our cam timing and our ignition timing, we may be fairly close to optimal. |
| 01:01 | That being said, if we're making more dramatic changes to the engine configuration, this will obviously affect the engine's volumetric efficiency, and in turn we may need to start making some slightly larger changes to these part throttle areas. |
| 01:16 | So we're going to look at two ways we can do this. |
| 01:18 | One will be to use the datalogging capability of the Hondata, along with the lambda overlay function, which we've already looked at to a degree. |
| 01:27 | The other way we're going to look at here is using the live tuning capabilities of the Hondata K Pro. |
| 01:32 | So we'll start with our live tuning capabilities. |
| 01:35 | This can be used for fuel, ignition, and cam timing. |
| 01:38 | We're gonna focus here on using it for our cam control, or cam targets. |
| 01:43 | So let's jump into our software and we'll have a quick look at how we can use the live tuning functionality. |
| 01:49 | There are a couple of ways we can select our live tuning options. |
| 01:51 | If we go to the online dropdown menu, we'll click on that here, and we come down to our select live tuning tables. |
| 01:59 | We can select the tables that were going to be available to us for live tuning. |
| 02:04 | Now it's important to understand how this works. |
| 02:07 | Conventionally all of the tables or the values for tuning are held inside the ECU's read only memory or ROM. |
| 02:16 | In order to make these adjustable in real time, these tables are then copied into RAM. |
| 02:22 | Now there is only a certain amount of RAM available so we're not able to tune all of the tables, we can only select a handfull, and this does become a little bit limiting as we're going to see. |
| 02:34 | So let's have a look at this now, and we can select for example our cam angle high speed and our cam angle low speed tables. |
| 02:44 | So we've got those two tables' little tick boxes beside them. |
| 02:48 | And you can see straight away that we've used 33% of our available memory here. |
| 02:52 | So it shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we're not going to be able to tune too many tables simultaneously and this becomes problematic of course if we want to start looking at multiple cam angles for our fuel. |
| 03:04 | So for example if we click on our fuel high speed zero degrees and 10 degrees, we've got four tables selected now, and our RAM memory is full. |
| 03:13 | So we're gonna unselect these and all we're going to look at for this point is our cam angle low speed but I'm gonna show you another way of selecting our live tuning tables. |
| 03:21 | So we'll unselect that and we'll close it. |
| 03:23 | Now at the moment we are on our cam target low speed here. |
| 03:28 | And we can see off to the side here, we've got a little icon here that says live. |
| 03:33 | Now right at this point this table is not selected for live tuning. |
| 03:38 | If I left click on that we can see a little diamond, a little yellow diamond comes up. |
| 03:44 | Now this shows that we have selected this table for live tuning, but we still need to send this calibration or upload this calibration through to the ECU for that to take effect. |
| 03:53 | So let's do that now. |
| 03:59 | Alright with that calibration now sent through to the ECU we can see that the little live box now shows a green tick, or a green arrow. |
| 04:07 | This means that now we can make live tuning changes to this particular cam target table. |
| 04:15 | So the demonstration we are going to go through is how we can use the cam target table in live tuning on our Mainline dyno in order to optimise the cam targets at part throttle under steady state conditions. |
| 04:28 | This does require a load bearing dyno that is sensitive and can display the torque being registered by the dyno. |
| 04:35 | Before we do this though, one more aspect we're going to adjust here is we're going to go into our parameters menu here and we'll remember that currently we have been running the ECU in open loop mode. |
| 04:46 | So it's not going to make any corrections to our fuelling based on the target air fuel ratio and our measured air fuel ratio. |
| 04:53 | In this case what we want to actually do is run the engine or the ECU in closed loop mode so I'm ticking the little built in wideband radio button there. |
| 05:03 | Now the reason I'm doing this is that as we adjust our cam target, this is going to adjust the engine's volumetric efficiency, we are going to be moving through the various fuel tables based on our cam target. |
| 05:14 | But if we've got any error there, we want the ECU to be able to adjust and get us back onto our target of lambda one under cruise conditions. |
| 05:22 | So that's gonna make sure that our lambda value stays fixed. |
| 05:26 | And that also gives us the ability to then look at our torque as well as our short term and long term fuel trims. |
| 05:33 | What we're looking for here is a combination that either gives us the maximum torque or as we'll find with the K20 engine, we're going to find that over quite a wide range of cam targets, our torque will stay relatively consistent and in this case what we're looking for is what cam angle gives us our minimum fuel delivery. |
| 05:54 | In other words we're looking for the minimum values for our short term and long term fuel trims as the ECU is trimming fuel out. |
| 06:02 | And this gives us the same torque for a fixed cell, but it also gives is an improvement of fuel economy. |
| 06:08 | So let's get us up and running now and we'll see how we can do this. |
| 06:21 | Alright so what we're going to do here is look at tuning one individual cell in our cam target map. |
| 06:27 | And what we can see here is we've got the engine running on our Mainline dyno, we're running in our column five, which is 52 kPa. |
| 06:35 | And we're also running at 2500 RPM. |
| 06:38 | So you can see for the moment the cam target there is 30 degrees. |
| 06:42 | We can see in our sensors window here we are in fact at 30 degrees, and that's also being displayed here in our graph. |
| 06:50 | So what we're going to do for this demonstration here is I'm going to make changes to the cell that we're interested in, and just to avoid any effect of interpolation, I'm going to also focus on all of the surrounding cells. |
| 07:03 | So the factors that we're going to be interested in, or watching during this demonstration, on our Mainline dyno, we've got our torque graph here. |
| 07:12 | So this is a green line, it's also being demonstrated here graphically or with our dial gauge. |
| 07:20 | And what we're looking for is when we make an adjustment to our cam timing, what happens to our torque. |
| 07:26 | But at exactly the same time, if we jump back into our laptop software, we're also going to be taking note of our short term and our long term fuel trims. |
| 07:36 | So again we're focusing on either optimising or maximising our torque. |
| 07:40 | And if we see that our torque stays flat over quite a wide range of cam angles, what we're going to do is take notice of our combined short term and long term fuel trims and look for the minimum value of those that still delivers us maximum torque. |
| 07:56 | Now because of the sensitivity of this, we do also need to be really careful when we are doing this. |
| 08:01 | We wanna make sure that we stay as close as we can to 2500 RPM, which you can see we're at now. |
| 08:07 | And the centre of our column here, the centre of column four is actually at 41kPa. |
| 08:14 | So we want to be very careful with our manifold pressure. |
| 08:17 | Just manipulate our throttle position, until we're as close to the centre of that cell as we can get. |
| 08:23 | Alright so what we're going to do now, is make an adjustment, so we'll just highlight those cells again, we use control J, and we're going to start by selecting those to zero degrees. |
| 08:33 | Before we do this we just wanna have a look at our current torque, and we can see that we're hovering around about 28, 29 newton metres at the moment. |
| 08:40 | So I'll press enter, that'll adjust us to zero. |
| 08:43 | We can see that our torque hasn't really changed much. |
| 08:48 | We're still sitting at about the same amount of torque. |
| 08:50 | We can see that our short term and our long term fuel trims now are combined pulling out 5% fuel. |
| 08:57 | So that actually shows us that potentially there's a bit of an advantage there. |
| 09:01 | We also wanna check that our manifold pressure is still sitting at 41 kPa, in the centre of our cell. |
| 09:07 | So we know that we're OK there. |
| 09:09 | Let's make another change there. |
| 09:11 | So we'll press control J and let's try 10 degrees and see what we get. |
| 09:16 | So at 10 degrees we've actually picked up some torque now. |
| 09:20 | We're up to about 30, 31 newton metres. |
| 09:23 | So it's only a very small change there. |
| 09:25 | We're making sure again that we are still in the centre of our cell. |
| 09:29 | So we're 41, 42 kPa so we're OK there. |
| 09:33 | We can also check out combined trims. |
| 09:35 | We can see that our fuel trims now combined are pulling 6% out. |
| 09:39 | So that's a step in the right direction. |
| 09:41 | Let's try another change here, we'll press control J, and we'll adjust to 20 degrees. |
| 09:47 | So we'll press enter and we're looking for what happens to our torque. |
| 09:51 | And really we haven't seen much change there. |
| 09:54 | We're still sitting at 30, potentially there's a very small change there where we've picked up to about 31. |
| 10:00 | Looking again at our manifold pressure, and our RPM, that hasn't changed. |
| 10:04 | And we're looking at our combined trims, at this point now we're pulling out 7%. |
| 10:10 | So again we're moving in the right direction. |
| 10:12 | Let's make another change here, we'll press control J, and we'll adjust our cam timing to 30 degrees. |
| 10:18 | Again we're looking at our torque. |
| 10:20 | We saw a small jump up there to about 34 newton metres, but it's settled back to where we were. |
| 10:26 | Let's have a look at our manifold pressure. |
| 10:28 | We know that we're still on point there. |
| 10:30 | We can see that our short term and long term fuel trims combined basically the same minus 7%. |
| 10:36 | So we haven't really seen any effect from that particular change there. |
| 10:40 | Let's go control J again and we'll try 40 degrees. |
| 10:43 | OK so 40 degrees again really haven't seen any change to our torque there. |
| 10:52 | I'll just get back into the centre of our cell, we're still at 42 kPa. |
| 10:57 | Still at about 30 newton metres of torque, and we can see that our short term and long term fuel trims combined now minus 8%. |
| 11:05 | So really we haven't seen too much change there. |
| 11:08 | There's obviously some room for variation while we're performing this test but we've been pretty stagnant there from 20 through to about 40 degrees. |
| 11:17 | Just for the sake of completeness, let's try 50 degrees here and we'll see what happens. |
| 11:22 | Now with 50 degrees we again haven't seen too much change in our torque, that's remained pretty fixed. |
| 11:28 | And our short term and long term fuel trims have also remained the same. |
| 11:33 | Alright we'll come back to idle and we'll talk about our results there. |
| 11:38 | So in this instance we really didn't see too much change between about 20 degrees and 40 degrees. |
| 11:44 | And our original value for that particular cell was around about 30 degrees. |
| 11:48 | So in this instance if we aren't seeing much difference across a range of cam angles, we're seeing the same torque and we're seeing relatively the same fuel trims. |
| 11:58 | The other aspect we can look at here is choosing a value that gives us a smooth trend to that table. |
| 12:03 | We've already talked about this, we want to create a smooth shape to our table that allows the mechanical cam control system to function correctly. |
| 12:10 | So in this case I would probably simply go back to the 30 degree value that we started with in that particular area. |
| 12:18 | Now of course depending on where you are operating in the table, depending what RPM and load point, we made see some more significant changes to our torque as we adjust our cam timing. |
| 12:33 | But typically on the low cam we don't see really dramatic changes as we adjust our cam target in the cruise areas of our map. |
| 12:43 | So the process here is just a rinse and repeat of what we've looked at. |
| 12:47 | Now we don't need to go and tune every single cell either. |
| 12:50 | Obviously that's going to take a huge amount of effort and a huge amount of time. |
| 12:56 | So instead what we can do, because we know that we're going to see a relatively consistent trend in our table, we can choose key points in our cam target table, optimise those using our dyno, and the torque feedback from the dyno, and the fuel trims on our logging, and then we can simply interpolate between those surrounding cells. |
| 13:15 | So to give you an idea of what that looks like, let's just go back into our table here, we'll complete reverting these values back to where they were before we go started so we've got a reasonably sensible shape to our table. |
| 13:27 | So at 2500 RPM for example I may have chosen to tune the 29 kPa site, I may have then chosen to tune the 64 kPa site and then from here we've already tuned our wide open throttle operating areas, so we can just smoothly interpolate between those bounds. |
| 13:46 | Likewise I may have chosen to tune at 2500 RPM and maybe 3500 RPM, and then smooth or interpolate between those bounds. |
| 13:55 | So once we've made our changes there, we want to obviously upload those back through to the ECU. |
| 14:01 | Now we're going to move on and we're going to have a look at how we can do steady state fuel tuning using our datalogging and using our lambda overlay function. |
| 14:10 | In order to use this lambda overlay function to perform steady state tuning, what we're going to need to do is run the car on our dyno. |
| 14:17 | This can also be done on the street but it is a little bit more tricky to get really good quality data. |
| 14:23 | And we're going to run the car at various RPMs and we're going to smoothly increase our load throughout the load rows. |
| 14:30 | What we're trying to do here is fill out the areas that we haven't been able to tune during out wide open throttle ramp run tuning. |
| 14:37 | Let's just jump back into our software here and we'll have a look at our low speed fuel table for zero degrees. |
| 14:42 | Now remember during our wide open throttle tuning we were really focusing on columns eight, nine, and 10. |
| 14:48 | These are the areas that the engine's operating in under wide open throttle. |
| 14:51 | So we don't want to make any further adjustments to those columns that we've already tuned. |
| 14:56 | Obviously if we do this, it's going to affect our wide open throttle operating. |
| 15:00 | So instead what we're trying to do is tune the part throttle areas, the idle and the cruise and the transition areas. |
| 15:08 | Now doing this manually can be done using our live tuning much like we've already looked at. |
| 15:14 | However we do need to be aware here, that the cam target is going to be moving, depending on our load and our RPM. |
| 15:22 | So this makes our job a little bit trickier. |
| 15:24 | So this is why I like using the datalogging capability along with our lambda overlay. |
| 15:30 | What I'm going to do is first of all make a change here to the settings for our lambda overlay. |
| 15:35 | Because we're going to be running the engine in steady state, we're going to be able to gather a lot of data for each of the cells, and in order to get a really accurate feel for what the lambda is at a particular load and RPM, we can increase the number of samples that the Hondata will use. |
| 15:54 | So let's go into our options and then our settings menu, and I'm on the lambda overlay table here already. |
| 16:01 | And we're going to come down here and just adjust the number of samples. |
| 16:05 | So instead of five which we've been using so far, we're going to increase this to 15. |
| 16:11 | So basically more samples is just going to give us a better look at what the real lambda value is for a given cell. |
| 16:18 | The other thing that's important to understand when we are doing this, is we want to be really smooth when we're using the throttle. |
| 16:25 | We don't want to be jerky where we can bring a transient enrichment which may affect our results. |
| 16:31 | Alright so what we're going to do now is run the engine and we're going to perform some steady state tuning here, accessing as much of the table as we can, up to around about 4500 RPM or just below our VTEC changeover point, so let's get our engine up and running and we'll see how that works. |
| 16:51 | An important consideration when we are using this technique here is that I have put the ECU back into open loop mode. |
| 16:57 | So we're not going to have our closed loop control getting us back onto target and we're going to be able to see the real error between our target lambda and our measured lambda. |
| 17:07 | The other aspect here is that before we actually start our logging, we want to allow the engine to run and get up to normal operating temperature, so we don't want the engine to either be cold and seeing warm up enrichment during this process, and likewise we don't want it to be heat soaked which is quite common if we've had the engine shut down, sitting on the dyno. |
| 17:26 | So at this point we're ready to start gathering some data, let's see how that works. |
| 18:56 | So at this point we have gathered some data on our dyno under steady state conditions. |
| 19:01 | We've done this between 1500 and 4000 RPM, and we've gone as low in the load as we can essentially get to on the dyno, and we've gone through to 75 kPa or our column seven. |
| 19:12 | Now what we're going to do is have a look at that data. |
| 19:14 | So jumping into our software, we can see at the moment we're looking at our lambda overlay table for our low speed fuel and we see that we've got no data at all. |
| 19:25 | Now this is because the lambda data that is logged is logged into the same cam angle as the engine was running at. |
| 19:34 | So we can see at the moment that we are looking at our zero degree fuel map. |
| 19:38 | And we've got no data there so we can step through these using the little plus and minus icons here, so we'll press through, look at our 10 degree map, and again we've got no data. |
| 19:48 | Get to 20 degrees though and now we can see that we've actually got some lambda data logged. |
| 19:53 | So we'll have a quick look at that and we can see that we haven't filled out the entire section. |
| 19:58 | Obviously we have been switching between our cam target maps as well. |
| 20:02 | Let's just move through again, we click 30 degrees and we'll see we've got quite a reasonable amount of data at 30 degrees. |
| 20:08 | We'll go through to 40 degrees, very small amount of data there, and we'll go through to 50 degrees, we've got no data at all. |
| 20:15 | So we need to be a little bit sensible in how we're using this data. |
| 20:20 | Right now we're looking at our measured or logged lambda values. |
| 20:24 | We can of course also come across and view our lambda targets, and we can see in the entire area that we are operating here, we are targeting lambda 1.0 Alright we'll come back to our fuel adjustment table now. |
| 20:39 | And now we can view the magnitude of change we need theoretically in order to get us onto our lambda target. |
| 20:46 | Now this is what we're going to use in order to help us make decisions on what changes to make to the fuel tables. |
| 20:51 | Just like we've already looked at, we're not going to take these values as gospel, we're not going to apply all of these changes and we're going to apply a little bit of common sense, we're looking for trends and we're also going to basically smooth out the values that we're seeing here. |
| 21:07 | One of the key points to look at when we are viewing these adjustment values, is do we have any outliers, any weird values that stick out? So if we've got a weird value that really doesn't match the numbers around it, then chances are something isn't right with that data, we're going to ignore it. |
| 21:25 | In this case everything's looking relatively smooth. |
| 21:28 | We can see we've got an area here particularly in the mid range from about 2000 through to about 3000 RPM where we are quite rich. |
| 21:36 | The error there is between 7% and 15% so we definitely need to do some work there. |
| 21:44 | Alright so let's go ahead and make some changes here. |
| 21:46 | And what I'm going to do is start with our 1250 RPM row. |
| 21:49 | And here what I'm going to do is any changes I make, I'm also going to extrapolate them right down into column one here. |
| 21:58 | And the theory behind this, what we're trying to do is again keep our fuel table looking consistent and smooth and we're also making the assumption that if we do have an error here, in column three and column four, there's a better than average chance that we're also going to see that error exist if we do drop down into column two. |
| 22:16 | So the values that we've got here at 20 degrees we can see we've got minus 9% and minus 8%. |
| 22:24 | So for our first round of changes here, we're going to take 6% out of those particular areas. |
| 22:31 | I'm gonna come across here and we can see that up to column five here at 52 kPa, we've got 8%, 6% and 6%. |
| 22:39 | So we'll just try there for our first round with minus 5%. |
| 22:43 | And then for our next two areas here, we'll take out 3%. |
| 22:47 | It is also important to mention that when we're going through this process, we don't want to beat ourselves up trying to get everything absolutely perfect. |
| 22:55 | That's simply not achievable, we're always going to see our lambda move around a little bit. |
| 23:01 | So generally if I'm seeing values of plus or minus about 1% I'm more than happy with that. |
| 23:06 | I'm going to be trying and making corrections on anything around 2% or larger in error. |
| 23:11 | Alright we'll come down here and we've got another area here of 6%. |
| 23:15 | So we'll just take out 5% through that area there. |
| 23:18 | Now in this area here we've got these values that are a little bit larger, 10%, 10%, 15%, 15% and 13%. |
| 23:26 | Now when I've got a large error like that, again, I want to start with a smaller adjustment. |
| 23:32 | So we'll take 8% out of these ares. |
| 23:34 | We'll come up here and we'll take out 4% from that area. |
| 23:40 | And we're going to take out 8% here. |
| 23:44 | So again just underestimating the magnitude of change we're actually making. |
| 23:48 | We'll make another change here of minus 4% and in this area here I'm going to leave everything as it is. |
| 23:56 | We've only got a couple of cells with a minus 1% error, I'm not going to be worried about those. |
| 24:01 | Now we can step up to our 30 degree cam map and we're going to do exactly the same, we're going to just go through and make some adjustments. |
| 24:09 | So let's do that now. |
| 24:30 | Alright so we've just completed making some changes there to our 30 degree fuel map and what we can see as well, it's important to look at this graphically and we can see by the way we're making these changes, we're keeping a consistent shape to that table, we don't want any areas, if we look at this in two dimensions, we don't want any areas with these lines overlapping. |
| 24:48 | So that's really important to make sure that our changes are smooth. |
| 24:51 | Alright we've got one more map to do here, we've got our 40 degree map, so we'll press the little plus icon here, and we'll make a couple of changes here as well. |
| 25:03 | Alright so our changes are complete there, we're going to now upload this new calibration into the ECU and we're going to repeat our process there, we'll gather the same data and we'll see what the effect of those changes has been. |
| 25:16 | So let's go through that process now. |
| 26:31 | Alright we've gone through there and had a look at our data after our first round of changes and we can see that we've still got some work to do. |
| 26:38 | Let's have a look at our fuel adjustment values again. |
| 26:41 | At the moment we're on our 20 degree cam map and we can see that our values are closer, we're generally now within about plus or minus 4% to 5%. |
| 26:50 | We've got a few areas, a few little outliers though that are a little bit outside of that range, we'll go through to our 30 degree cam map, and we can see particularly in those areas that we had values of minus 15%, minus 12%, minus 13%, now we are a lot closer. |
| 27:06 | So we can see, using the lambda overlay function in the K Manager software, does make it very easy and quite quick to dial in your fuel tables across all of the cam maps under steady state conditions. |
| 27:19 | Let's move on now and in the next step we're going to have a look at how we can just make some small adjustments or fine tune an existing calibration. |
