Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 2: Trigger Setup
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Step 2: Trigger Setup
09.29
| 00:00 | - The next step of our process is to configure our trigger inputs to the ECU. |
| 00:04 | And this is possibly the most critical part of our ECU setup. |
| 00:08 | This gives the ECU all of the critical information around engine speed and engine RPM and if this information isn't correct and isn't coming in in the correct order, then it's impossible for the ECU to properly control the ignition timing as well as the fuel delivery. |
| 00:26 | So let's dive in here and we've come across to our trigger setup page and we can do this wherever we want. |
| 00:33 | It's easy with the Ecumaster to configure certain pages to show you the sort of information you want for a particular task. |
| 00:41 | So we'll come back across to triggers here. |
| 00:43 | Alternatively you can find all of this information from the ignition menu structure, in particular we want to come down to the bottom here to our triggers. |
| 00:53 | So we start here with our primary trigger so this is our engine speed input essentially. |
| 01:01 | We can select the type of sensor, in this case with most Subarus they run a variable reluctance VR or magnetic sensor on the crankshaft, we can of course choose from our drop down menu, our options there being VR or a hall/optical sensor. |
| 01:17 | We've got an adaptive threshold option here which essentially defines the relationship between the triggering voltage and the engine RPM. |
| 01:29 | With a variable reluctance magnetic sensor we find that the trigger voltage can increase or does need to increase as RPM increases. |
| 01:36 | To give us clean triggering but also avoid the noise threshold or background noise that will occur relative to RPM. |
| 01:44 | In this case we can choose from low or high, I'm actually going to reset that back down to low. |
| 01:49 | Next option here is for a pull up or pull down resistor. |
| 01:53 | With a variable reluctance sensor we don't need a pull up, that must be set to none. |
| 01:57 | We've also got an input filter and if we click on our drop down menu we can choose none, low, medium or high. |
| 02:04 | It's always a good idea to try and use as little filtering as possible here. |
| 02:10 | Otherwise we can end up in a situation where trigger information that we actually want the ECU to get is ignored. |
| 02:17 | Of course if our triggering filter is too low and there is genuine problems there we may end up with triggering errors, this can be a bit of a trial and error adjustment once the engine is up and running. |
| 02:28 | In this case we are going to leave that set to low. |
| 02:31 | Now possibly the most important part here is our trigger type, so we can see at the moment this is set to Subaru and it's a 36 minus two minus two minus two trigger pattern so particular to this particular engine. |
| 02:43 | If we look at our drop down menu we've got a range of generic as well as engine specific trigger modes. |
| 02:50 | So in our case the correct mode here is this 36 minus two, minus two, minus two. |
| 02:55 | If you've to a unique engine then Ecumaster will be able to provide you guidance on the correct setup for your particular engine. |
| 03:03 | Our trigger edge, also this is quite important as you'll remember from the body of the course, if we've got this set incorrectly, particularly for a variable reluctance input, or alternatively polarity of our wiring is incorrect, we're going to end up with timing drift as our RPM increases so falling is typical here and we're going to leave that as such. |
| 03:22 | We've now got our number of cylinders here, obviously that's a pretty straightforward adjustment, we've got a four cylinder Subaru engine, nothing to change here. |
| 03:32 | The next two parameters that we're going to look at here, our first trigger tooth and our trigger angle. |
| 03:38 | This essentially defines where abouts on the trigger pattern the ECU will be looking for, defining where top dead centre on number on cylinder is. |
| 03:46 | And it's a case of making adjustments between these two. |
| 03:50 | It's important to mention here that the trigger angle, this is used for calibrating the base ignition timing which we're going to look at in a further step. |
| 03:59 | However what we want to do is basically choose a first trigger tooth here so that the correct value for our trigger angle is somewhere in the range of perhaps 50 to 60 degrees, we're obviously slightly outside of that but the important point to note here is that this will also define the maximum ignition advance value that we can use. |
| 04:20 | Obviously in this case, 69°, we're never going to need to be there but it is also possible to end with settings here that artificially limit your maximum range of ignition advance so it's just a case of moving between those two until you've got values that you want. |
| 04:35 | Coming down further here we've also got a little tick box here for our enable scope so it's important to tick that, that allows us to use the scope which we can see down here. |
| 04:46 | And this will allow us to get an indication of whether the ECU is correctly picking up the trigger inputs and making sure that they are aligned correctly. |
| 04:54 | We can do this by either cranking or running the engine and then pressing this little blue arrow that will capture data that we can then review in a bit more detail. |
| 05:02 | Lastly we've got the option here to lock our ignition timing or ignition angle to a fixed value that will ignore the table values, this is important which we'll see when we go through our base ignition timing setup, for the moment we'll leave that as it is. |
| 05:17 | Moving over the next trigger setup we've got is for our secondary trigger which is our cam sensor so in this particular engine, the JDM variant with variable cam control, this is a hall or optical sensor, three wire sensor so it's important to make sure you've got this correct. |
| 05:35 | In many of the Subaru variants this will still be reluctor, in our case it isn't. |
| 05:39 | With a hall or optical sensor, because this is a digital output, we do need to use a pull up resistor here so we've selected that from our drop down menu. |
| 05:49 | Again, we've got our input filter, we've got that set to low. |
| 05:53 | We've got our trigger type, so again this can be selected from a drop down menu and missing tooth is the option here, this is a three tooth pickup with missing teeth allowing the synchronisation to occur as well as this is used for the variable valve timing control. |
| 06:10 | Trigger edge, exactly the same as we saw with our VR sensor on our crank. |
| 06:14 | We've also got the ability to enable synchronisation without the cam sync. |
| 06:19 | In this case I don't want to allow that to happen, I want to make sure that I do have a valid cam sync or secondary trigger input before the engine will synchronise. |
| 06:27 | Likewise you have the ability to disable the cam sync above a certain RPM range. |
| 06:32 | And again I want to make sure that the engine is always relying on the cam sync so essentially set that at an RPM above which we'll be running. |
| 06:39 | We've got the ability to set up an advanced filter if you require, in this case we don't. |
| 06:45 | Lastly with our trigger setup, because this is a variable valve timing engine, we also need a cam position sensor on our other camshaft so that we can see cam position on both banks of cylinders. |
| 06:58 | It's essentially a rinse and repeat of the setup for our secondary trigger. |
| 07:02 | We do have some information here on our minimum tooth and maximum tooth count. |
| 07:07 | And this is defined based on the specifics of your cam control system. |
| 07:12 | There is some information in the help file if you want to read more. |
| 07:16 | This is a setup that will be particular to your particular cam control style of engine and information specific to your engine can be gained from Ecumaster direct. |
| 07:27 | Alright so at this point we've got our trigger system set up correctly and we should be getting valid RPM information to the ECU and it should also synchronise. |
| 07:37 | We can check this by going back across to our fuel tab here, our fuel page. |
| 07:43 | And we've got some information that's relevant here. |
| 07:45 | We can see we've got our engine RPM and at the bottom here we can also see we've got a little status flag showing that at the moment we have no sync so the engine is not synchronised. |
| 07:56 | Now what we've done here is disabled our ignition outputs. |
| 07:59 | Now you can do this by physically unplugging the coils or alternatively if you come back up to your ignition outputs, we'll open that back up, you can see that it's just as simple to disable the four outputs for our ignition coils. |
| 08:12 | This is just done so that at the moment we don't really want the engine to start and run. |
| 08:17 | So what we're going to do now is crank the engine and what we should be looking for here with our RPM is we should be seeing a nice smooth consistent crankIng RPM, generally around about 200 to 300 RPM depending on the specifics of the engine. |
| 08:30 | The more important aspect is to make sure that it's consistent, we don't see any spikes in that. |
| 08:35 | At the same time we should see our no sync status flag here go green and it should show that we are synchronised. |
| 08:42 | So let's do that now. |
| 08:49 | Alright so we saw everything worked as expected, I'll also just paused our logging here and we'll just pull that up because we do have our RPM being displayed on this log file and we can see if we just scroll over to the relevant area here, our RPM as we're cranking, sitting at 223 RPM, our RPM in red, our red parameter here. |
| 09:13 | So zero before we cranked it, sitting consistently here at about 225 RPM. |
| 09:18 | So everything's looking really good there. |
| 09:21 | At this point we can reenable our coils and we can move on with the next step of our process. |
