Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing
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Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing
39.26
| 00:00 | - In the first step of our 10 step process, we're going to go through the Adaptronic Modular ECU software Eugene and we're going to set up all of the inputs and outputs to the ECU, essentially making sure that everything that we've got set up is reading correctly, giving us sensible readings and that all of our outputs are correctly configured and operating as we'd expect. |
| 00:21 | Doing this right at the start of our process is going to save us potentially wasting a lot of time once we hit the dyno later on, if we find out that something hasn't actually been configured correctly and this is an area that a lot of tuners, even experienced ones will overlook. |
| 00:36 | As we go through this as well, we'll be learning a little bit more about the Eugene tuning software and how to navigate your way around that and how to manipulate the different aspects of the software. |
| 00:47 | The Eugene software is relatively intuitive and relatively straightforward to use but like every system there are a few little intricacies that do take a while to get your head around so we'll learn about that as we go. |
| 01:01 | Let's start by diving into the software and at the moment we are on the home tab. |
| 01:06 | A range of aspects that we will be controlling from here. |
| 01:10 | In particular we can open and save files here. |
| 01:13 | It's important to mention that when we do make a change to the tuning on the Adaptronic Modular ECU, it is automatically written to the ECU so we don't physically need to save our changes into the ECU. |
| 01:24 | If we disconnect and then reconnect, those changes will stay active, however of course we may want to also save our file. |
| 01:31 | We can also select how to display our units in terms of metric or imperial depending on your own personal preferences. |
| 01:38 | Nice feature with the Adaptronic ECU is that it does include a built in scope function. |
| 01:45 | We'll have a look at this in a bit more detail when we get to the point of looking at our trigger setup but it can be a really quick way of diagnosing wiring or setup issues with your trigger inputs specifically. |
| 01:57 | We've also got the ability here to update your firmware and the Eugene software will actually tell you down in the bottom right hand corner, we do have a little update button there and that will tell you if there is a firmware update available so it's important to always make sure that you are on the latest firmware as often there are bug fixes from the ECU manufacturers as the firmware is updated so it's important to make sure that you are on the latest more stable firmware to avoid potential problems that you could easily overcome. |
| 02:29 | On this particular screen as well, we have the ability to jump straight to our common maps which are of course our fuel and ignition maps, we'll have a look at that a little bit later on. |
| 02:39 | Also of value which we'll see as we start tuning is the controls for our logging setup here and we're going to be relying on that again as we get further into the tuning. |
| 02:49 | For now though what we're going to do is head across to our next tab which is our inputs tab, we can click on that and this gives us a range of additional options, we're going to go through these one by one. |
| 03:00 | We'll start by clicking on our engine details. |
| 03:02 | And this is where we set up the basics around our engine. |
| 03:06 | In particular the engine capacity here. |
| 03:09 | So 1300cc, it's important to be accurate here because the Adaptronic Modular ECU does work on the VE or volumetric efficiency tuning basis and if we don't have our engine capacity correct, then this will end up skewing our VE values. |
| 03:27 | Obviously with a rotary engine it is what it is in terms of our engine capacity but more so with piston engines, particularly if they've been rebuilt, it's possible to end up with a completely different capacity to what the factory engine actually had so important to pay attention to that. |
| 03:44 | Next we have our number of cylinders or rotors, obviously in this case our 13B engine is a two rotor, again need to make sure that that is accurate. |
| 03:53 | We can see here we've also got our firing mode. |
| 03:57 | This is going to be dependent on the engine, in this case with a rotary engine it fires once every 360° of rotation instead of 720 like a piston engine so essentially similar to a two stroke in that way. |
| 04:13 | If we click on this we can also select more conventional 720° or four stroke operating principle there. |
| 04:20 | Once we've defined the very basics of our engine configuration, we can also choose to write some notes here about the vehicle. |
| 04:27 | If you're tuning professionally for a living you can also add in your tuner details if you'd like. |
| 04:33 | It can be useful here to store some specifics about the engine configuration or the installation even so that at a later point, coming back to the tune file, can make some of your input and output configurations make a little bit more sense. |
| 04:46 | So anything specific that you think will be valuable at a later point. |
| 04:50 | The next setting that we've got available here in our little menu structure is for our triggering however we're going to have a look at that in a separate module so for now we're going to bypass that and instead we'll have a look at setting up our analog inputs to the ECU. |
| 05:06 | We've got a range of different inputs there. |
| 05:08 | We'll start with our manifold pressure sensor. |
| 05:11 | Now when we click on this option here the first option that comes up or the first adjustment that comes up is for our MAP filtering options. |
| 05:20 | So this is a little unique, I don't see this on too many ECUs but it essentially allows us to define how the ECU will filter the inlet manifold pressure signal. |
| 05:30 | The reason this is important is that if we actually look at the inlet manifold pressure at high speed, as we move through the engine cycle we find that as the intake valves open and close or in the case of our rotary engine, our intake ports open and close, we actually end up with an oscillating sinusoidal waveform for our manifold pressure. |
| 05:50 | So it actually matters where abouts in the engine cycle that MAP sensor value is sampled or in this case how it's filtered. |
| 05:58 | So if we look here at the moment we've got average over 180° cycle, that's our option there, we look at the drop down list and we can see there's actually quite a large number of options so how do we do this? What we want to do is first of all take the number of degrees of crankshaft rotation per engine cycle and then we divide that by the number of ignition events. |
| 06:20 | So in this case let's say we've got, we'll bring up our calculator here and let's say in this case we've got a rotary engine, obviously, so instead of 720 for a normal four stroke engine, we've actually got 360° per engine cycle, we'd divide that by number of rotors, in this case two and we've got 180. |
| 06:42 | Let's look at a slightly more conventional piston engine and in this case it's 720° for a four stroke engine. |
| 06:50 | Let's say we've got an eight cylinder engine so we'll type in eight there, so for a four stroke eight cylinder engine, we'd want to average our sample over 90°. |
| 07:01 | So really easy to do there but important to understand how that works otherwise you can get yourself into trouble with an inaccurate MAP signal. |
| 07:09 | Also got the ability here to actually filter that sample as well so in this case we've got a 50 ms sample, filter time I should say. |
| 07:18 | Now that we've got our filtering dialled in, we can then actually click on our intake map one and this will define where abouts that signal is coming from. |
| 07:26 | So in this case our first adjustment or option here is where abouts the source for the sensor is. |
| 07:34 | If we look at our drop down list we can use our internal iMAP or eMAP sensor or an external iMAP sensor. |
| 07:40 | So in this case as I mentioned, we have wired up an external iMAP sensor. |
| 07:44 | Then we need to define the type of sensor that is fitted so that's where our second drop down menu comes in here. |
| 07:51 | You can see at the moment I've chosen generic which is what we're going to do when we want to define the sensor specifications ourselves. |
| 07:58 | If we look at our drop down menu though, there are a number of pre configured options, particularly there for some conventional 0.5-4.5 volt sensors and on the power MAP sensors as well so we're going to leave that at generic. |
| 08:13 | When we do that, we make our adjustments using the calibration for external iMAP sensor table here which we can access by clicking on this little button. |
| 08:25 | So we'll do that here. |
| 08:27 | And we can see that we've got our voltage points and we've got our pressure. |
| 08:31 | So in this case we've got a four bar manifold pressure sensor. |
| 08:36 | So pretty conventional there. |
| 08:38 | We'll head back to our MAP sensors now and our intake MAP one and we can see once we've done this it's really easy to see exactly what we're seeing on that particular input. |
| 08:49 | So in this case we can see here we've got a voltage on that particular external iMAP input of 1.09 volts and based on our calibration that means our inlet manifold pressure is sitting at 98.5 kPA absolute. |
| 09:07 | At the same time we can also see that below our iMAP external value we see our iMAP value which is from the internal onboard iMAP sensor which we aren't using in this particular example. |
| 09:19 | So that deals with our inlet manifold pressure sensor. |
| 09:24 | If you're running an exhaust manifold pressure sensor you can set that up in a similar way. |
| 09:28 | It's important to mention, if you are going to run exhaust manifold pressure which allows you to use an engine pressure ratio instead of a more conventional manifold pressure for our load axis for our fuel and our ignition tables, it is important to use a damper to actually remove some of the noise from that signal, the exhaust manifold pressure signal can be quite noisy and in its raw form isn't overly useful so an external damper is used or a canister is used there just to filter that signal a little bit mechanically and make it a little bit cleaner for the ECU to deal with. |
| 10:05 | Alright we're going to move on and we'll move over to our liquid pressure sensors and we've got a couple here to choose from. |
| 10:13 | We have actually a wide range of options here, the two that I'm going to deal with here are our oil pressure and our fuel pressure sensors. |
| 10:19 | So at the moment we can see that we do have our oil pressure sensor chosen. |
| 10:25 | We've got the sensor type for our external oil pressure, in this case again we've got a drop down menu of options. |
| 10:32 | We can choose a pre configured option which in this case we're using a 150 psi gauge sensor, 0.5 to 4.5 volts, pretty common Honeywell style sensor. |
| 10:44 | Or alternatively you've still got the generic option, so if you've got something that's a little bit unique that isn't covered here, you can define your own calibration for that sensor which would look exactly like what we just saw for our iMAP. |
| 10:56 | In this case, don't need to change that there. |
| 10:58 | Then we've got the source, where abouts is this sensor actually wired on the ECU. |
| 11:04 | In this case we've wired it to the default location so there is a preconfigured pin on the ECU for our oil pressure. |
| 11:12 | Always a good idea where possible to use that, otherwise you can scroll down and choose a different location or different channel based on where you actually added that in. |
| 11:21 | Again we've got the option to add some filtering just to remove a little bit of noise from that signal, make it a little bit cleaner and then finally we've got our current voltage and our current oil pressure being shown so we know exactly what's going on, we can again check that the voltages and the displayed pressure are exactly what we'd expect to see. |
| 11:43 | We'll also have a look at our fuel pressure and really this is going to be very similar so we'll click on fuel pressure there. |
| 11:47 | We're running the same style of sensor, only this time we are running a 0-100 psi gauge sensor so really important to make sure that you are choosing the correct calibration. |
| 11:59 | Again this is wired to the default fuel pressure pin or input on the ECU header and again we've got the displayed voltage and fuel pressure there. |
| 12:10 | Given that the fuel pump has been running previously, we can see we've got some residual pressure being shown so all relatively straightforward there. |
| 12:19 | I'll just quickly show you here, we also have the ability to add in an ethanol or flex fuel sensor. |
| 12:27 | We are running this as I mentioned, although we won't really be dealing with this. |
| 12:30 | So this has to be wired up to a digital input, in this case we are, we've wired that up to the CAS 3 or cam angle sensor three input and with that configured we can see that we've got 2.2% ethanol content, I've actually got the ECU powered down at the moment, the car powered down so if we powered that up we will see exactly what we've got, our fuel temperature pops up as well so while we aren't running flex fuel at the moment, the fuel temperature input from the flex fuel sensor can be used for the fuel density calculation in the ECU as well. |
| 13:05 | First of all, in our general settings here we've got the ability to select a single average if you're running dual sensors or individual. |
| 13:14 | We're running a single sensor here in the exhaust downpipe. |
| 13:18 | If we click on O2 sensor one, we can see where we've got that connected, we'll deal with this in a little bit more detail shortly but you can see that's coming in via a CAN wideband controller but we've got a variety of options from analog to serial to internal lambda or CAN so we're using that CAN wideband controller to ensure the integrity of our air/fuel ratio data. |
| 13:43 | Next we'll come across to our pedal position sensor, this is where we'll set up our throttle position or driver's accelerator pedal position information in the ECU. |
| 13:53 | This is an area where we have actually made some changes to our engine configuration because we have converted this engine to drive by wire throttle control or e throttle, using an external BMW S54 drive by wire motor. |
| 14:09 | We're not going to cover the intricacies of the drive by wire setup for this particular worked example, we'll cover that in a webinar if you are interested in learning more, in our webinar archive. |
| 14:22 | So from here on we will really be treating this as if it is a conventional cable throttle. |
| 14:27 | In which case for the most part you're going to be able to leave our input type here set to automatic. |
| 14:35 | And what you'll see here is that we do have two throttle pedal sensors. |
| 14:39 | So that's why we've got TPS one and two. |
| 14:44 | That wouldn't be normal, with most cable throttle systems you're just going to have a single one here, this is one of the aspects of drive by wire. |
| 14:51 | So what we can see is exactly what's going on here, we can see our voltages down here as well. |
| 14:58 | And it's really as simple as starting by making sure that we're completely off the throttle. |
| 15:01 | Then we can simply click on the learn current voltage for our pedal calibration one and we'll do exactly the same for calibration number two. |
| 15:11 | Once we've done that, we then go through to full throttle and we want to make sure that we're applying positive pressure on the pedal so we really are at full throttle and we'll click learn voltage for the 100% positions on both the sensors. |
| 15:25 | Once we've done that, we just want to do a bit of a sanity check and make sure that everything is making sense so we can see live readouts of everything down here. |
| 15:33 | We can see there our pedal one and pedal two throttle positions, so you can see they're bouncing around pretty close to zero at the moment, we'll just smoothly go through there to 100% and make sure that those track nice and accurately and they are so they're doing everything they should be doing. |
| 15:51 | We've got another couple of parameters here as well which is used for our wide open and close throttle detection, closed throttle you can see there I've set to 1% so basically we need to be below this for aspects such as our idle speed control to function and wide open there we've got above 95% so you can again see we've got a couple of flags for those aspects, we can make sure that those are also displaying what we'd expect. |
| 16:16 | We'll move on now and we'll head across to our atmospheric pressure sensor. |
| 16:20 | Now not necessarily something that we have to have but in our case we had a spare onboard iMAP sensor so that's what we've done there, we've gone ahead and used that so first of all, atmospheric pressure mode. |
| 16:33 | So we can see we've got that set there to external input and obviously tells us there the channel number is in the offset, if we look at our drop down menu we've got the other options available so it's quite common not to have a barometric or atmospheric pressure sensor in which case you can have the option here to sample the manifold pressure before the engine is started and use this as a fixed baro value. |
| 16:57 | So nothing particularly wrong with that unless you are driving in an area where you're likely to see large swings in baro pressure, this would happen particularly if you're driving in an area with large altitude changes. |
| 17:08 | You can also fix it, we're obviously using the external input there. |
| 17:14 | So then we've got the channel source which in this case we've got channel two which is coming from our internal eMAP input so alternatively we can select from the drop down menu of our other available channels. |
| 17:28 | Now interestingly here with this particular input, even though we are using the pre defined or pre configured onboard eMAP sensor, when you select that, you actually have to go through and still enter a calibration which is what we can do here, so we'll click on view and edit table. |
| 17:47 | Much like what we've already looked at, so this is of course a four bar sensor but I had to go through Adaptronic's tech support and actually find out what that particular sensor was so I could configure it. |
| 17:59 | Heading back we can see that once we've got that configured we can see the live voltage from that particular channel and we can also see the current barometric air pressure sitting at about 97 kPa. |
| 18:11 | We'll quickly have a look at our other analog input sensor and we'll click on that and at the moment you can see we've got the ability to have two turbo speed inputs. |
| 18:21 | We actually are running turbo speed on this, not really relevant for today's worked example but we can see that that is configured as a BorgWarner EFR turbo speed sensor and the source as you can see there, vehicle speed sensor input. |
| 18:35 | Alternatively you can choose that from another range of options there. |
| 18:39 | We aren't running a second speed sensor so that's all we've got going on there. |
| 18:43 | We'll move over to our temperature sensors and we'll again just cover the basics here, we've got a engine coolant temperature sensor and an air temp sensor that we'll look at. |
| 18:53 | We can see with our engine coolant temperature sensor which is up at the moment, the sensor type there, much like we've already looked at, we can choose a generic sensor in which case we'll calibrate that ourselves or we can choose from a range of pre defined sensors. |
| 19:09 | Interestingly here the pretty common likes of the Bosch coolant temperature sensor actually isn't pre defined so something that we ended up doing ourselves. |
| 19:20 | We've got the source, where abouts is that sensor wired, again there are default locations or pins on the ECU header that we should wire to, alternatively you can select a difference source if required. |
| 19:33 | Calibration here, if we click on view and edit table we can see we've got a 2D table here of our resistance versus engine coolant temperature. |
| 19:43 | And you'll be able to get this from your sensor supplier so nothing particularly tricky there. |
| 19:49 | Head back to our temperature sensors. |
| 19:51 | We'll also have a look at our air temperature and really this is exactly the same here, we've got a generic sensor where we are defining the sensor calibration. |
| 19:59 | We've got the source, which in this case we are bringing our air temperature in from channel 10 which is our manifold air temperature sensor input. |
| 20:08 | And then our calibration here. |
| 20:10 | Now important to mention here, depending on how your sensors are defined, if we go down to our biasing and filtering option down the bottom here. |
| 20:20 | This allows you to essentially enable or disable the internal pull up depending on how everything is wired there, how you've set up the ECU. |
| 20:29 | And that will also change the table for your calibration between resistance and voltage so just an important thing to keep in mind here and of course with each of those options there we also have a ability to set a filter for the channel as well. |
| 20:46 | So if we come back to our engine coolant temperature and our air temperature, we can see once we've got everything set up, we can see the voltage on the pin. |
| 20:55 | Bearing in mind these are a two wire or two pin sensor, these are a negative temperature coefficient sensor or thermistor. |
| 21:06 | So they rely on the internal pull up to five volts within the ECU to actually generate a voltage, we can see that it is showing the resistance there and of course the manifold air temperature. |
| 21:16 | Now a good sanity check once you've done this as well is to just make sure that your readings are sensible. |
| 21:23 | Now right now we've had our engine running prior to beginning filming but normally when you're just getting started with your setup, you won't have had the engine running and you want to make sure that first of all, both your engine coolant temperature and your manifold air temperature are reading sensible values, they should be relatively close to your current atmospheric temperature and just as importantly they should be reading within a couple of degrees of each other as well. |
| 21:49 | Now if we head across to the right hand side of the screen here, you can see we do have this little gauge icon and if I click on this, this will bring up some gauges on the right hand side here so you can set up basically whatever you want here to be monitoring. |
| 22:02 | We can see we've got our engine coolant temperature and we've also got our manifold air temperature being displayed there so couple of key parameters that we would want to keep an eye on. |
| 22:13 | if you do want to modify the values being displayed or the channels being displayed, we can right click there and we can click on add new display, you can set this up however you like but the ones I've got there are just a text gauge and then you can go through and select the particular channel that you're interested in watching. |
| 22:31 | And then you can just grab those and resize them, move them around to suit your personal preferences. |
| 22:38 | So at this point we've got our temperature sensors all set up, everything's working there. |
| 22:42 | We've also got the ability to have some external 0-5 volt inputs, I'm not really going to deal with these here. |
| 22:49 | In this case we are running a few additional sensors on this engine that aren't going to be relevant to our worked example, likewise we've got also a servo input here which we are using for a wastegate position sensor. |
| 23:04 | And we do also have a knock input that we can set up. |
| 23:07 | Now, my personal opinion when it comes to tuning rotary engines and knock sensing is that it's not something I recommend. |
| 23:15 | I know there are tuners that will recommend or set up knock control on a rotary engine. |
| 23:20 | I don't and the reason for this is twofold. |
| 23:23 | First of all, the rotary engine is, as I've mentioned already, incredibly intolerant of almost any level of detonation. |
| 23:29 | So this means that probably by the time knock has been detected, it's a very high risk that you've already done some damage to the engine so not particularly useful, definitely not as useful as it is on a piston engine. |
| 23:42 | The other aspect, probably more importantly though is to actually validate and set up the knock control strategy properly we need to actually make the engine knock and again that's not something I would recommend on a rotary engine so again comes down to being a little conservative with our ignition timing and playing it safe rather than trying to squeeze every last horsepower out of the engine. |
| 24:05 | Moving on, we do have some setups for some additional functionality here, including wheel speed and gear detection, digital inputs and logic inputs, however for the purposes of our worked example we aren't utilising any of those functions so we can move on. |
| 24:20 | And to do so, we're going to come across now to our outputs tab up the top here. |
| 24:26 | So with our outputs, there's a few things that we do need to set up here and we're going to start by clicking on our fuel system. |
| 24:34 | Again with the volumetric efficiency based fuel model, really important that your fuel system inputs are set up correctly. |
| 24:40 | So we'll start with our fuel system type here. |
| 24:43 | And it's really important to start with the basics here which is what type of regulator have we got fitted? Is it manifold pressure referenced, which is what we're running, in which case the manifold pressure, sorry the fuel pressure will rise and fall with boost pressure and vacuum. |
| 24:59 | So we can click on that, the other option with a returnless style system is we have a fixed fuel pressure. |
| 25:04 | So really important to make sure that you've got that right, otherwise the ECU's calculation for pressure, differential pressure across the injector is going to be completely wrong. |
| 25:14 | As part of this as well we need to also set our nominal fuel pressure so this is the nominal differential pressure across the injector. |
| 25:23 | In this case I've chosen to go with 350 kPa differential pressure here. |
| 25:27 | There's no fixed rule that we must follow here but it is reasonably common with a return style fuel system to run three bar, 300 kPa or 43.5 psi. |
| 25:38 | Just because I know that we're likely to be getting a little bit marginal on injector capacity once we start running E85, I've bumped that up a little bit just to buy us a little bit of additional headroom there. |
| 25:50 | Now coming down we've also got our fuel pressure modelling so in this case, we have a fuel pressure sensor, we've already looked at the setup for that so we can enter measured here. |
| 26:01 | So this means that the ECU will know exactly what the fuel pressure is, in which case our nominal fuel pressure really is only going to come into play and become useful or important if we had a failure of that fuel pressure sensor. |
| 26:13 | However if you don't have a fuel pressure sensor, you would be choosing nominal here. |
| 26:18 | In which case the ECU is going to base its calculated fuel pressure off whatever value we've put in there plus whether or not we're running a pressure referenced regulator in our system. |
| 26:29 | Again we can then see what our fuel pressure actually is, the calculated fuel pressure and the differential fuel pressure so we know exactly what's going on here. |
| 26:39 | Also got a little tick box here for trimming for our fuel density as that varies so if we've got our fuel temperature being incorporated, which we do with our ethanol content sensor, then we can set that up as well or tick that box and that can make our fuel calculations a little bit more accurate as the fuel temperature varies. |
| 26:59 | Next we've got our injector setup so we'll click on primary injector here and again, really important to have this right. |
| 27:09 | In this case as I've mentioned we're running ID1300 primary injectors so what we want to do here is click on search and you can see there is a fairly sizeable list of pre defined injectors that Adaptronic have done the heavy lifting for us there and properly characterised those injectors so we want to choose from that list. |
| 27:30 | Now if you are using an unusual injector that isn't on that list then I would suggest getting ahold of Adaptronic and asking if they will characterise the injector or maybe they have characterisation data for that. |
| 27:42 | Once you've selected the injector, we also want to click on set to use the injector default so we're similarly going to do this for our primary and then if we head across to our secondary you can see we've done the same there, we've got the ID1700. |
| 27:55 | Now this is a good time to move a little bit out of our usual strategy as we go through these worked examples and just talk very briefly about the injector staging. |
| 28:04 | We will see this in action once we get into the tuning. |
| 28:07 | When we click on injector staging, I just want to briefly go through it here. |
| 28:10 | So this is common with rotary engines, they will run staged injection with a primary and a secondary injector, just because we have two rotors, it'd be very difficult to get the fuel demands of the engine reliably handled with a single injector per rotor. |
| 28:25 | So we can see here we've got the ability to se the number of stages of injectors. |
| 28:30 | So obviously we're going to set that to suit our installation. |
| 28:34 | In this case with the Adaptronic ECU we can choose I believe up to four stages. |
| 28:40 | So plenty of head room there as long as you've got enough injector outputs to suit. |
| 28:44 | So we've set two stages there, we also need to set the minimum off time for our stage one. |
| 28:50 | So this is an around about way of defining the maximum duty cycle that the primary injectors will be allowed to run up to. |
| 28:56 | So it's not really defining injector duty cycle, it's defining the minimum cycle time that the injectors must be off for. |
| 29:03 | So what this means in turn is that the maximum injector duty cycle will be a little bit dependent on our engine RPM. |
| 29:09 | In this case we're going to leave this at the default value of two milliseconds which will be absolutely fine for our application. |
| 29:17 | We can also select what we're going to be using for our load selection for our staged injection. |
| 29:25 | You can see once everything's dialled in there with our injector data, the ECU will also tell us what the current flow for each of the primary and secondary injectors are based on the current differential fuel pressure so you'll see that varies once the engine is up and running. |
| 29:41 | We'll very briefly just detail here the staged injection map and this is quite a unique feature with the Adaptronic in that in an instance like our rotary engine here where what we want to do is use both injectors to their maximum in order to provide the required fuel, the ECU actually does the heavy lifting for us in the background here. |
| 30:02 | So we don't specifically need to set numbers in this 3D staged injection table. |
| 30:10 | Basically numbers of zero here mean that all of the fuel will be delivered by the primary, number of 100% would be everything's delivered via the secondaries. |
| 30:18 | So in this case it looks like we aren't actually asking for any fuel from the secondaries but what will happen is that if we leave the table like this, the ECU will drive the primary injector as hard as it can up to the point where we get to that two millisecond off time limit an at that point it will automatically start bringing in the secondary injection so very seamless for us because there's nothing much to do as a tuner however does rely on the injector characterisation data being correct and accurate if you want the best results. |
| 30:47 | Alternatively if you're dealing with a naturally aspirated engine where you purposefully want to stage in 100% to a secondary injector that's maybe fitted outside of the trumpets then you could obviously adjust the numbers in this table to suit your own personal requirements. |
| 31:02 | Next we're going to have a look at our ignition setup and we're going to start with our output control. |
| 31:09 | Another one of the changes we've made on this engine is that we have done away with the factory Mazda waste spark ignition coil arrangement and we've fitted a set of four IGN1A direct fire coils. |
| 31:20 | So first thing we need to do is select the correct ignition mode to suit our application. |
| 31:26 | So in this case we are direct fire rotary with two plugs per cylinder and split angle, for a conventional direct fire piston engine we would be choosing direct fire single plug per cylinder. |
| 31:39 | We've also got conventional modes for the factory FD or FC using waste spark distributors etc so we'll leave that where it is. |
| 31:49 | We've got our firing pattern as well so in this case we can choose how often the engine is going to, the ignition system is going to fire, in this case with our rotary engine, every 360° and we can see here the ECU Eugene tells us how many ignition outputs are being used, in this case four for our direct fire spark. |
| 32:12 | We've next got our ignition sense so essentially this is how the ECU drives the ignitor. |
| 32:18 | It's important to make sure this is correct, otherwise we risk burning out our coils. |
| 32:22 | As we can see here, the option of falling edge is normal. |
| 32:26 | Not too many ignition systems or coils that will use a rising edge trigger. |
| 32:32 | Honda is one of the ones that springs to mind there but make sure that you do have that set correctly. |
| 32:38 | We've also got the ability to set an ignition delay and this can be used to basically ensure that our ignition timing remains consistent from idle all the way through to our rev limit. |
| 32:49 | We'll talk a little bit more about how we can adjust this delay once we've got our engine up and running. |
| 32:57 | Next we move down to our dwell time so this is the charge time for our coils. |
| 33:01 | Needs to be set based on the coil that we are operating. |
| 33:04 | In this case the IGN1A coils, relatively easy to get some dwell time numbers for those, you can see this is a 3D table relative to the battery voltage which is a primary consideration and also RPM is in there as well. |
| 33:22 | We'll move back to our output control now. |
| 33:26 | Next we've got our cranking ignition timing versus our coolant temperature so you can adjust this if you wish, we'll click on view and edit table there. |
| 33:36 | We can see at this point we're running zero degrees ignition timing at crank, irrespective of our engine coolant temperature. |
| 33:45 | This is something that is not typically needed to be adjusted but in some engines it can be helpful there so it's worth understanding that that option is available. |
| 33:54 | Then we have our timing lock as well so you can see at the moment we're running no timing lock, this is going to be important while we are setting our base timing so our other option is we can set our timing lock normal for a piston engine or there is a rotary specific timing lock as well which will set our ignition events at a specific point, we'll talk about that as we get through to testing and setting our ignition timing in a later step. |
| 34:25 | Now if we come back up to the top here and we click on period angle offsets we can also define where those spark events are going to go so pretty straightforward with our setup here, we've only got two offsets there so zero and 180° and this shows us our firing order which is again a relatively straightforward one too. |
| 34:44 | Obviously things get a little bit more complex with this when we are running more cylinders with a piston engine as well, this is where we can essentially define our firing order for our engine. |
| 34:56 | Let's move across now and we'll have a look at our outputs. |
| 35:00 | So this is where we can set up any additional outputs, we can also define where everything is on our ECU header so we can see here we've got our injector one primary and secondary setup. |
| 35:12 | We've also got our ignition leading and trailing setup. |
| 35:16 | In terms of additional outputs, we've got a couple here, we've got our wastegate or our boost control solenoid. |
| 35:23 | So we can choose a particular output for that and then we can select the function so you can see here we've got our wastegate one duty, that's what we've selected. |
| 35:33 | There are a few considerations when we're setting something like this up so first of all we've got some little tick boxes here, we've got this one here which says invert so essentially defines whether for our boost control, a number of 0% duty cycle will in fact drive the solenoid full open or full close so very easy to get tripped up with this one as well if you haven't got it set correctly to your actual boost control system. |
| 36:00 | In case of a boost control solenoid, we obviously also want to pulse width modulate it as well so we need to click there and tick that box to enable pulse width modulation which will then give us the ability to set the frequency that that output will be functioned at. |
| 36:16 | Likewise we've got the ability here to set up our thermofans which we've got two stages set up in that output screen. |
| 36:24 | I just want to move out of order for a moment here and if we click on our functions tab here I just want to show you through the CAN setup. |
| 36:32 | There's a range of functionality here including some special functions that you can work through depending on what you're doing with the ECU but what we want to look at here is our setup for CAN one. |
| 36:45 | The reason that is important is because as I mentioned we are using a lambda to CAN module so first of all we can set the bit rate for our CAN bus, in this case one megabyte which is pretty common for most aftermarket ECU CAN modules. |
| 37:00 | We can also select whether or not we need to enable a terminating resistor onboard with the ECU, that will depend on your wiring and then as I've mentioned we've got the wideband here so we can choose the wideband type. |
| 37:13 | In this case we've got the MoTeC PLM, there are a range of other widebands that are supported and you can choose whether it is a single or dual channel wideband so that's how we're getting that wideband information in. |
| 37:27 | Now we're going to have a look and see how we can actually test our outputs and confirm that they are operating correctly so what we're going to do is head across to our diagnostics tab and we're going to click on our injector and ignitor test. |
| 37:42 | So this allows us to operate or function each of the ignition and injector outputs and we can actually see we've essentially got a scope here of injector voltage and current so we can see exactly what's actually happening while the output is being driven. |
| 37:59 | So we start by selecting whether we want to test our injector or our ignition and which channel, in this case we're testing injector output one. |
| 38:09 | The idea here is that we want to physically pulse each of the outputs and make sure that they're connected to the correct positon. |
| 38:18 | In other words we want to make sure that the injector that we think is for our primary injector on rotor one is in fact wired to that location. |
| 38:27 | This does require a helper, essentially every time we press this go button here, what it's going to do is pulse that injector or ignition output one time. |
| 38:36 | And we'll be able to audibly hear where that's coming from, alternatively you can also unplug that particular injector or coil and make sure that you're not getting an output when you run this test so important to make sure you go through that, make sure that all of your ignition and injector outputs are in fact wired and operating correctly. |
| 38:59 | So at this point we've gone through our basic setup, we've got all of our inputs and outputs on the ECU connected up, we know that all of the inputs are reading correctly, we know that our basic fundamentals of our setup for our fuel system and our injectors are correct and we know that the ignition and injector outputs are wired up correctly and operating as we'd expect. |
| 39:21 | We can now move on with the next step of our process. |
