Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing
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Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing
18.52
| 00:00 | - For our first step we're going to have a look at the ECU configuration and then we're going to also test our inputs and outputs. |
| 00:07 | Essentially just make sure that everything is working before we ever get to the point of actually trying to start the engine. |
| 00:14 | Now our job is made a little bit easier here in so much as the ECU is actually a plug and play model. |
| 00:22 | And what this means is that the base map already has a configuration that is normally good enough to get the car up and running. |
| 00:30 | However we're going to go through the process anyway and have a look at some of the specific inputs and outputs. |
| 00:37 | So let's start now, I'm going to press the escape key and that's going to just bring out our ECU settings menu. |
| 00:45 | And what I'm going to do for a start is have a look at our analog inputs. |
| 00:50 | So if we look at our analog inputs here we can see we have engine temperature and inlet air temperature as well as our MAP sensor, we'll have a look at these as our first parameters. |
| 01:01 | If we click on engine coolant temperature, we can see all of the aspects here for our engine coolant temp setup and this is a standard Bosch NTC sensor. |
| 01:12 | So there's not a lot that we need to do here. |
| 01:15 | What we do want to do is make sure that our reading is normal. |
| 01:20 | We can see that our engine coolant temperature down the bottom is showing 19 degrees centigrade at the moment. |
| 01:25 | Now that's pretty typical for the kind of day we've got here at the moment and also the engine has not been started for the first time yet. |
| 01:33 | So we're happy with that, we'll just have a quick look at our inlet air temperature, and the settings here just really mirror what we've looked at for our engine coolant temperature. |
| 01:44 | With our engine coolant temperature and intake air temperature, it's always a good idea to look at how closely the two correlate. |
| 01:50 | Again, particularly if the engine has not been started, we should normally see these within a couple of degrees of each other. |
| 01:57 | Now we've got a slightly higher intake air temperature here than our engine coolant temperature, in this case I know that our calibration for these two is correct. |
| 02:06 | Now we'll go back to our analog inputs. |
| 02:09 | We've also got an analog voltage input set up for oil pressure, so this is an auxiliary sensor. |
| 02:16 | And we can see here we've got our parameters for that. |
| 02:19 | We can choose our function from our drop down menu for any of these auxiliary functions that we want to choose so in this case you can see we've selected oil pressure, we'll also have other pre configured inputs for aspects such as fuel pressure. |
| 02:36 | Now in this case we need to choose a calibration for that particular sensor. |
| 02:39 | And there's a few ways we can do this, you can see under calibration, in this case cal four is selected. |
| 02:46 | Again if we double click we can open up a drop down menu and we can choose calibration tables which are full three dimensional tables or we can choose in this case a simple calibration. |
| 02:57 | For pre configured sensors or common sensors, you can see that those are also already optioned there. |
| 03:04 | So let's go back out and what we'll do is we'll enter cal four and we'll have a look at the calibration we're using for this. |
| 03:11 | Now these parameters here simply come from the data sheet for the sensor and you can see that we've got an input value of AMB which is the extremes of the sensor's voltage range, in this case 0.5 to 4.5 volts. |
| 03:26 | And we can see that these correspond to our output values A and B, in this case 0 kPa and 1034 kPa. |
| 03:36 | Once we've done that, if we press the R key to bring up our run time values and click on the analog tab, what we can do is just make sure that our oil pressure is reading something sensible. |
| 03:48 | So again with our engine obviously not running we're expecting to see our oil pressure sitting very close to zero. |
| 03:54 | In this case that's exactly what we've got with 3 kPa. |
| 03:59 | OK we've also got our MAP sensor calibration to consider here and if we look at our analog voltage inputs again, we can see that our MAP sensor is connected on analog voltage input one. |
| 04:15 | We'll click on that and we can see that this is again a preconfigured selection. |
| 04:19 | So MAP sensor type is set to four bar, again clicking on a drop down menu, we can look at all of our options there. |
| 04:26 | Now with the MAP sensor calibration we do want to go to the next step though as well, once we've got that configured, if we click on ECU controls and we go down to MAP sensor calibration and click on this, it will ask us if we want to perform a MAP sensor calibration. |
| 04:43 | We'll click yes, it's important to make sure that the MAP sensor calibration did complete successfully which is what this little pop up box is showing us. |
| 04:51 | Once we're happy with that, we can click OK. |
| 04:54 | What this does is just calibrates the MAP sensor against the barometric pressure sensor and if we have got a calibration error there, the ECU will let us know because the MAP sensor won't calibrate correctly. |
| 05:08 | We're going to go through one more setup here in our inputs and that is for our drive by wire throttle control. |
| 05:15 | So if we go back to our analog voltage inputs, we can see that we've got four sensors set up here. |
| 05:23 | This is particular to a drive by wire or e throttle configuration. |
| 05:27 | We have TP main and sub, these come from the drive by wire throttle body fitted to the engine. |
| 05:33 | We also have APS which stands for accelerator pedal sensor main and sub, and this is what the driver's foot controls. |
| 05:40 | Now the setup for our drive by wire throttle body is relatively straightforward. |
| 05:46 | What we want to do is simply go back into our main menu structure, and if we come down to our electronic throttle, we want to go to e throttle one, and for a start what we're going to do is go to e throttle one setup. |
| 06:00 | Now we can see at the top here our e throttle mode is set to on/setup mode. |
| 06:07 | If we double click we'll see the options here, we have off, which we'd be using if we had no drive by wire throttle body, we have on which is what we need to be using when we're actually driving or using the car. |
| 06:19 | It's very important that the setup mode is only used for configuration and setup as all of the safety functionality is disabled when we're in setup mode. |
| 06:29 | At this point though, we do want to be in setup mode so we'll leave that there. |
| 06:33 | You'll notice that there are some parameters here that are specific to the throttle body, so these are the PID settings and this is how the ECU controls the throttle body. |
| 06:44 | These are not numbers that you'll be coming up with yourself, these are peculiar to the actual e throttle body that you're using and these come from your Link dealer. |
| 06:54 | If there are wrong it's going to really affect the control of the electronic throttle body, so you must make sure you have settings that are correct for your particular installation. |
| 07:06 | OK so once we've gone into setup mode, we can go back into our menu and we're going to start with our accelerator position sensor. |
| 07:14 | We'll double click on that and there's a very simple setup here. |
| 07:18 | All we need to do is double click on our accelerator pedal calibration and then we'll follow the prompts here. |
| 07:25 | So if we click OK and the ECU is first of all asking us to put the throttle pedal all the way down. |
| 07:32 | We'll do that, click on next and then we release the pedal. |
| 07:35 | And what this does is it just configures the open and closed voltages for both the APS main and APS sub sensors. |
| 07:44 | So that's our accelerator pedal travel configured correctly. |
| 07:48 | Next we're going to go back and we're going to go into our throttle positon sensor calibration. |
| 07:55 | Everything looks the same here and again all we need to do is double click on the TP calibration icon. |
| 08:01 | We'll click OK and this is an automated procedure where the ECU will run the e throttle body through its full range of travel and make sure that it's getting valid signals from both the TP main and the TP sub sensors. |
| 08:15 | Once everything's finished, it'll say TP cal finished which we can see now, and we can close our setup. |
| 08:22 | Now we can see if we move our throttle pedal, we can see that our throtte body does in fact move between 0% and 100%. |
| 08:32 | At closed throttle you'll notice we're actually sitting at 0.9%. |
| 08:36 | This is because the ECU also uses the electronic throttle body for idle speed control and we'll look at that a little bit later on. |
| 08:44 | OK so that's our basic inputs to the ECU set up and tested there. |
| 08:48 | We're going to have a brief look now at both our injection and ignition outputs. |
| 08:53 | So let's press escape and what I'm just going to do is press INJ and that's just going to bring up everything in our search there related to the injectors. |
| 09:02 | Now again this is relatively straightforward in this configuration because the ECU comes pre configured for the Corrado engine so everything is already set up. |
| 09:13 | We can see that we have injector drives one through to four set up as injection. |
| 09:18 | Now we can also test our outputs, we can go down to injector test and what we can then do is go through and test each of the injectors and what we'll do, once we select the injector we want to test, we'll be able to audibly hear that injector pulsing. |
| 09:36 | The other thing this allows us to do is confirm the wiring is correct and the correct injector is being controlled. |
| 09:42 | Now let's have a look at our ignition system and if I press escape and type in IGN, it's going to bring up everything to do with our ignition system. |
| 09:51 | In particular here we want to start by looking at our ignition drive configuration. |
| 09:57 | We can see that our ignition drives one to four are configured. |
| 10:01 | Also if we click on our ignition main this is where we can set up our ignition mode. |
| 10:07 | And in this case we do have a coil on plug arrangement so we've got this set to direct spark. |
| 10:14 | Again all of these settings are configured for a plug and play ECU so there's little for us to do here. |
| 10:20 | We've also got our spark edge and this is really critical to set up to suit your particular ignition system. |
| 10:27 | If you've got this set incorrectly, you're going to end up burning out your coils very quickly. |
| 10:33 | While the majority of ignition systems will use a falling edge mode, there are some instances where you'll want to use or need to use a rising edge so it's important to check with your ECU manufacturer to confirm which is the correct mode for your particular application. |
| 10:51 | Next we have our dwell mode and this defines how the dwell table will be set up, in this case we are using a conventional mode where it is in units of milliseconds. |
| 11:03 | We've got an ignition delay here as well which we're going to talk about a little bit further on. |
| 11:08 | Now we've got our ignition system set up, what we're going to do is just have a look at the ignition system test and we can do that by going to ignition test. |
| 11:18 | And is really works exactly the same as the injector test we've just looked at. |
| 11:23 | We can test each one of the coils and when we select on, what will happen is that the coil will be pulsed and create spark. |
| 11:31 | Now if the coils are still installed on the spark plugs, you'll be able to audibly hear the spark occurring and again we can use this to help us diagnose and confirm that everything is wired up correctly. |
| 11:45 | So at this point we've got all of our inputs and our outputs to the ECU correctly configured and we've tested and confirmed that they are all wired correctly and working correctly, now we're going to move into one of the most critical aspects with a volumetric efficiency based fuel model and that is the configuration of the fuel system. |
| 12:06 | So we can do that by clicking escape to bring our ECU settings out again. |
| 12:11 | We'll click on fuel and then fuel setup and what we want to do is start by going to our fuel main page. |
| 12:19 | Now what we've got here for a start is our main fuel equation mode. |
| 12:24 | And this is the important part here, if we double click on this we can see the options. |
| 12:30 | We've got traditional, we've got modelled and we've got modelled multi fuel. |
| 12:33 | So the modelled fuel equation, this is Link's volumetric efficiency based fuel equation so this is the one we're going to be setting and tuning today. |
| 12:42 | Our injection mode, just moving back up out of order for a second, is set to sequential and this is our preferable mode as long as we've got a trigger system that's providing all of the required data to the ECU, this is the mode we want to use. |
| 12:56 | Next we have our equation load source which you can see is set to load equals MAP. |
| 13:01 | Now this is the normal setting for this load source, we'd really only be wanting to use something different if perhaps we were tuning an engine with individual throttle bodies. |
| 13:11 | Moving down we have our engine capacity and this is a critical aspect again with a volumetric efficiency or modelled fuel equation. |
| 13:18 | We need to tell the ECU accurately what the engine capacity is. |
| 13:22 | In this case the base engine is 1.8 litres but in this case it has also been taken out to just under two litres so 1994 cc. |
| 13:33 | Moving down we've got our fuel system type so it's important here to configure this, we can have a manifold absolute pressure referenced fuel system. |
| 13:44 | This is where the fuel pressure moves up and down in relation to the manifold pressure. |
| 13:50 | We've also go returnless which is what we'd use in a lot of modern cars where there is no return line and the fuel pressure is fixed. |
| 13:57 | If we are using a fuel pressure sensor we can select this and then the ECU will automatically compensate for any changes in our fuel pressure. |
| 14:07 | So we're using MAP referenced here, we have no fuel pressure sensor. |
| 14:11 | Next we've got our base fuel pressure which we've got set here to 400 kPa or four bar. |
| 14:17 | This is the fuel pressure that the injector flow data is collected at and we'll be looking at that injector flow data a little later. |
| 14:25 | Now we need to set all of the fuel characteristics and these include the fuel density, the fuel density temperature coefficient and the stoichiometric air fuel ratio. |
| 14:37 | These parameters, we don't need to come up with by ourselves, if we press F1, what we'll find is there are settings or configurations available for the common fuels that we're most likely to be tuning on there. |
| 14:51 | So we'll close that down, so we've used the configurations suggested by Link in the help file for both the fuel density and the fuel density temperature coefficient. |
| 15:00 | Our stoichiometric AFR is simply 14.7:1 for our normal pump gas. |
| 15:07 | We've also got a fuel charge cooling coefficient. |
| 15:12 | Now we're going to actually look at how to tune this a little bit later and this really accounts for the cooling effect of the fuel on the charge air after the fuel has been injected. |
| 15:24 | And this can affect the air density as the air, the inlet air goes past the intake valves. |
| 15:31 | So this needs to be configured if we want to have the ECU able to correctly track our target lambda changes. |
| 15:39 | We've got our last parameter which is our minimum effective pulse width for our injector, this is a parameter that comes from the injector data. |
| 15:49 | OK so now we've got our basic setup there for our modelled fuel equation configured. |
| 15:55 | We do have a little bit more work to do though. |
| 15:57 | If I press the escape key again, what we can do is go into our injector setup. |
| 16:02 | And this is really critical, again with a modelled fuel equation because the ECU needs to accurately know what size the injectors are, or more critically, what mass of fuel will be supplied for a given pulse width, and if it knows this very accurately, then it's possible to very very accurately control the air fuel ratio and our modelled fuel equation will work much better. |
| 16:28 | Now in this case, for our worked example we're using a set of Injector Dynamics ID1000 injectors and this makes life very easy because all of the injector data is available on the internet straight on Injector Dynamics website and that's where we've got the data that we're using at the moment. |
| 16:47 | So in this case our, we're using a two dimensional deadtime table, we'll look at that in a moment. |
| 16:54 | Our injector flow at four bar, 400 kPa, 1180cc and again our rated fuel pressure here is 400 kPa. |
| 17:03 | We've got two other tables here to fill in, we've got our injector deadtime table and this again simply comes from the Injector Dynamics website for the ID1000 injectors at our rated fuel pressure of 400 kPa. |
| 17:19 | We've filled that in and the other table that's important to understand here is our injector short pulse width adder table. |
| 17:27 | Now this takes into account some of the flow variations in the non linear short pulse width area of flow. |
| 17:36 | Now we're going to be able to enter this data, or we have entered this data correctly here because again with the Injector Dynamics injectors, all of this data is available on the ID website, makes it very very easy. |
| 17:48 | And in this case, what we've done is copied this data from the GM calibration data or characterisation data that Injector Dynamics offer. |
| 17:58 | Now if you don't have short pulse width adder data for your particular injectors, that's not the end of the world. |
| 18:06 | In a lot of cases you won't have this data, most injector manufacturers aren't offering this, and in this case my recommendation is to simply set this table to zero. |
| 18:18 | This will affect the accuracy of your volumetric efficiency table, particularly in the low pulse width areas, perhaps around idle and very light cruise. |
| 18:28 | But it's still possible to get a very good result with your tuning. |
| 18:32 | OK so at this point we've got all of our configuration done there, we've gone through our inputs and outputs, we've tested everything and we've gone through and configured all of the required parameters for our modelled fuel equation to work correctly. |
| 18:47 | We can now move onto our second step. |
