Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing
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Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing
48.31
| 00:00 | - The first step of our 10 step process is to configure our ECU and test our inputs and outputs, making sure that the ECU is properly configured to suit the engine, all of the inputs and outputs that we want to control and then of course making sure that all of those inputs and outputs are actually reading correctly as we'd expect and are operating as we'd expect as well and this can save a lot of time once we actually get up and running and then maybe find out half way through the tuning process that we've got a baked in error that we're going to have to go back and fix. |
| 00:29 | The starting point here of course is beginning by installing and opening up our MTune MaxxECU software. |
| 00:38 | It's always a good idea as well just to make sure that you are running on the latest version of this software and make sure that your firmware is up to date. |
| 00:45 | If we jump across to our software here we can see that up the top here when we first open the software, it's saying what version number we are currently on, we can compare this to what is currently available on the MaxxECU website to ensure that we are on the latest. |
| 01:00 | We can also see this green bar up here at the moment which is saying that we are currently online with our ECU as well as our PDM and again just to reiterate we're mainly going to be ignoring the power distribution module side of things as we go through this. |
| 01:16 | Just a quick look around here to familiarise ourself with the software and on the left hand side, we have a menu structure here that essentially makes it pretty easy for us to find whatever we're looking for, we can expand and shrink down any of these menus as we require. |
| 01:33 | This allows us to focus on just what we need to know without everything becoming overly cluttered. |
| 01:37 | Down the bottom here we've got a few options, we've got our logger controls, our real time displays and some shortcuts here. |
| 01:45 | Our real time displays in particular this will show us all of the live parameters and we can use this for some diagnostics which we'll see as we go through this worked example. |
| 01:55 | Right down the bottom here we've got a many bar structure or a display I should say. |
| 02:00 | We can choose what we want to display down here, so at the moment we're on our general tuning display and we can see live parameters from all of our key aspects that we want to monitor. |
| 02:10 | As we click through here, we've got different pages set up for idle tuning, boost tuning, obviously not relevant to us today, nor is variable valve timing or e throttle. |
| 02:20 | So we'll come back to our general tuning. |
| 02:22 | Alright we'll see more of how the MTune software functions and how to navigate our way through it as we move through this worked example. |
| 02:30 | It is relatively intuitive and pretty easy to find your way around, also has a really good help structure as well, help menu file which means that if you do get stuck, it's really easy to work that out from the help file. |
| 02:44 | Let's start by moving across to our configuration here and we'll click on our engine settings and this is where we're going to get started with our base setup. |
| 02:54 | To begin with what we're going to need to do here is choose the type of engine we are tuning here and in our case, as in most instances, we're on our piston four stroke, we can of course choose piston two stroke or rotary from our drop down menu. |
| 03:09 | Next up we have our cylinder count, of course B18C being a four cylinder engine and then we need to enter our engine displacement. |
| 03:19 | 1797 cc here, this is important because of the volumetric efficiency nature of the ECU so getting this wrong can bake in some errors that could cause us some issues later on. |
| 03:31 | This should be relatively straightforward to find from the engine manufacturer specifications however you do need to be a little bit mindful of engines that may have been modified. |
| 03:40 | Even with an over bore that is going to affect our actual engine capacity and of course stroker kits could have a signficant impact here. |
| 03:48 | We've also got to set our parameter here for our engine maximum cranking RPM. |
| 03:53 | This is just the RPM above which the ECU will decide that the engine is running when we move out of our cranking maps. |
| 04:01 | So 300 RPM here is default, we can easily check this when the engine is cranking but 300 to 400 would be pretty typical I would imagine here for most engines. |
| 04:11 | Moving down, we have our firing order here and as with the majority of four cylinders, the B18C is one, three, four, two. |
| 04:20 | If you are not sure about the firing order, again you'll be able to find this out with a little bit of time spent on Google, the manufacturer specifications will be available for just about any modern engine or you'll be able to find these from technical forums that are specific to your particular platform. |
| 04:38 | Moving down, lastly we have our firing angle calculation so this is really only relevant to specific applications, in this case the B18C is an even fire engine so we don't need to worry about it so this is our base setup done for our engine configuration. |
| 04:55 | Moving back across to the left here, we can see that we've got a few other parameters that do come under this configuration menu structure as well, our ECU logging settings, some bluetooth settings etc, I'm not going to focus too much on these, those are not really relevant for the rest of our worked example so we'll shrink that back down and what we'll do now is move down to our fuel menu and we're going to expand that out and let's get started here with our fuel general so we can click on that. |
| 05:25 | Alright starting at the top with our general fuel injection settings here we can see we've got our injection method. |
| 05:32 | Now this is currently set at sequential 720°, if we look at our drop down menu we've got a range of options here. |
| 05:40 | In this case, sequential 720°, this is what we would want for full sequential control. |
| 05:45 | Obviously this requires a engine speed and engine position input which we'll look at in a further step in this worked example so if we don't have that, we're not going to be able to run full sequential. |
| 05:57 | Being that it is a 4 stroke, we've got one injection event every 720° of engine rotation so this will allow us, if we want to, to control the injection timing accurately on each of our injectors. |
| 06:10 | Moving down, our next option here, we can see which is a little bit unusually named is multiply lambda, we can either have this enabled or disabled. |
| 06:20 | Essentially this takes into account with our volumetric efficiency table, the lambda target and if we want to run true or real VE numbers in that table, in other words numbers that should be accurately representing the real volumetric efficiency of the engine, we do need to have this function enabled. |
| 06:39 | Next we've got use map sensor, and again we can see that we've got the ability to have this set to yes or we can disable it if we are running TPS based load. |
| 06:48 | So for a alpha n operation where we're running on TPS, we can disable the map sensor. |
| 06:54 | This would be useful if we're running a very aggressive cam where our manifold pressure signal is not useful for scheduling our fuel. |
| 07:02 | In this case we've got a standard plenum and a factory set of cams so we will be using manifold pressure. |
| 07:09 | And then finally our last option here is for staged injection, which we don't need, we've got that disabled. |
| 07:15 | Next for a volumetric efficiency based fuel model, we also need to understand what our fuel type is so we need to set our stoichiometric air/fuel ratio, in this case we're running on pump gasoline as I've already mentioned with a stoich air/fuel ratio of 14.7:1, there's a drop down menu here for a variety of the fuels that we may come across. |
| 07:35 | Moving down we also have to configure our injector settings here, again this is really important with VE based fuel models so that the ECU accurately knows how much fuel is going to be delivered, what mass of fuel is going to be delivered for a specific pulse width delivered to the injectors. |
| 07:53 | In this case, I have chosen the Bosch 250cc injectors that are fitted to this engine from the drop down menu. |
| 08:00 | If we click on that drop down menu, there is a fairly extensive list of injectors that's going to cover most of what you're likely to come across. |
| 08:08 | However on the odd chance that that isn't the case, you can move up to the top here and you can click on user defined and of course then that's going to allow you to define the characteristics of that injector yourself. |
| 08:21 | This will require some information from your injector supplier and you'll be able to enter that for example down in our injector dead time values here as well as the injector flow. |
| 08:33 | However in our case, we know that our injectors are pre defined so let's go back and we'll reset those to how they were. |
| 08:40 | Alright our next two parameters here just specify the number of injectors first of all per output, in other words if you've got more than one injector paired off one single injector output on the ECU, you can specify that here and then also the number of injectors that you have per cylinder. |
| 08:58 | Our installation here is of course just per the factory and one injector per output, one injector per cylinder. |
| 09:06 | We've got our injector flow settings as well, this is fuel pressure tracking. |
| 09:11 | So let's have a look at that, we've got fuel pressure sensor one tracking. |
| 09:16 | Look at our drop down menu here and we and have this fixed value with manifold vacuum or boost tracking. |
| 09:23 | We would select this, if we've got a fuel pressure regulator that is tracking the manifold pressure so in other words raising or lowering the fuel pressure relevant to manifold vacuum or boost and that's relatively common with return style systems, particularly older vehicles like the factory B18C, that is how it is from factory. |
| 09:44 | Then the next option we've got here is fixed value, fixed pressure. |
| 09:48 | So this would be what we'd choose for a returnless style or where the manifold pressure is not referenced so we've got a fuel pressure regulator where the regulator is not connected to a manifold pressure source. |
| 10:02 | Then we have fuel pressure sensor one or sensor two tracking which is what we're doing here. |
| 10:06 | Now what this allows, as long as we provide a fuel pressure sensor, which we have wired and installed on this particular application, the ECU can actually monitor the real time fuel pressure and this allows it to adjust the injector pulse width as required to compensate for variations in injector pressure. |
| 10:28 | So this allows a more accurate control of our fuelling rather than just assuming a specific fuel pressure is reaching the injector, we can actually monitor and account for what the real fuel pressure is so wherever possible, this is definitely a recommended installation, it just does require the installation of a sensor as well. |
| 10:45 | Now let's have a look at our last option here which is our injection event angle so this is where particularly as I mentioned earlier, with full sequential, we can choose exactly when the injection event will occur. |
| 10:57 | There's a little bit to understand around here. |
| 10:59 | So first of all, our angle reference, we can see this is before top dead centre, we can have this before or after and then what the event we're referring to is, in this case are we talking about the start of the injection event or the end of the injection event. |
| 11:15 | So in this case we've got end of injection and we've got this table just set to a single value here just for simplicity at this stage, of 400° which we know is before top dead centre. |
| 11:26 | Alright that covers off the main elements that you're going to need to understand about the general fuel settings. |
| 11:32 | Let's close that particular menu down now and we'll move down and have a look at our ignition settings and again, we'll start with our based here which is our ignition settings option. |
| 11:43 | Before we dive into the options in the ECU here, this is one area where we have actually made some modifications over the stock distributor with the single coil setup that the Honda B18C runs. |
| 11:56 | We've done away with that, we have retained the distributor, however this is now purely as a crank and cam position sensor. |
| 12:04 | Instead we're running an individual coil on plug setup. |
| 12:07 | Absolutely no need to do this in most instances but we had this kit on the vehicle so that's what we're going to be running. |
| 12:15 | Coming back into our ECU settings, we can see first of all our settings there are our injection system type, really important obviously with our application here, we have chosen coil on plug sequential. |
| 12:27 | So if we open up this, in stock form with this particular engine, we would be choosing the distributor option. |
| 12:34 | We can also have dual distributor, quite a specific setting for a limited number of engines, we've got waste spark etc. |
| 12:40 | So we'll go back to our coil on plug. |
| 12:43 | We've also got our ignition system delay and it's a little bit hard to set this at the moment with the engine not running. |
| 12:50 | This just accounts for the delay between the ECU actually requesting the spark to occur and it actually occurring. |
| 12:55 | This is a relatively small number but it can cause a small error in our actual ignition timing being delivered to the engine, particularly this occurs a variation through the RPM range. |
| 13:07 | Typically around about 80 microseconds is about right, we've left this at the default value for now but we can come back and check on this once we've got the engine up and running. |
| 13:16 | Moving down through the menu, our next option here is our lock angle function which we'll be looking at once we actually start timing up the engine so this allows the ECU to output a fixed ignition timing value, irrespective of RPM, irrespective of load, so basically it will ignore the ignition timing table. |
| 13:36 | Now why that's important is it allows us to align the timing using a timing light at the engine and essentially what the engine is actually receiving with what we're seeing inside of the ECU software and failing to do that is going to potentially end up causing some significant and expensive engine damage. |
| 13:53 | Again we'll look at this particular function once we get into setting up our base ignition timing and base fuel pressure. |
| 14:00 | Now with the actual number here, again we'll look at this as we go through, we want to choose a number that we can easily see on the crank pulley, so something that we can actually see the value and generally we also want a number were the engine will happily idle so that'd probably be somewhere between about five and 20°. |
| 14:21 | A lot of engines will have timing marks at 10 or 15 or maybe multiple timing marks, we need to know what we're looking at there as well. |
| 14:29 | Moving down, we've got our cranking ignition angle. |
| 14:33 | Now this is a function that most ECUs or many ECUs don't really give a lot of control over. |
| 14:38 | The MaxxECU allows us to output a specific ignition timing during cranking, we can see first of all we have our cranking angle, we can have this fixed or we can have it as a table. |
| 14:49 | In this case we've got it fixed at a single value, I don't see the need here to overly complicate this and we've fixed this value at 10°. |
| 14:57 | Now what we want to know here is what the engine is likely to need under cranking conditions to allow it to start quickly and easily. |
| 15:06 | Generally I find somewhere between about five to about 20° is going to be OK here or suitable for cranking. |
| 15:15 | We can find, particularly with some high compression engines with aggressive cams using too much ignition timing during cranking can make the engine want to kick back so in that case, retarding the timing a little bit during cranking can be helpful but again somewhere between about five and about 20°, you can test this once we get to the point of actually starting the engine to see how your particular engine responds. |
| 15:38 | Next we have our dwell settings for our ignition coils. |
| 15:42 | Now first here, we have our dwell mode and if you aren't really familiar with what dwell means, it's essentially the charge time for the coil. |
| 15:51 | The coil needs to be charged for a certain amount of time before it actually reaches full charge and if we don't allow it to charge for the correct amount of time it won't have sufficient spark energy so particularly under high boost or high RPM operating conditions, if we don't dwell the coil for long enough, we may end up suffering from a misfire. |
| 16:10 | Going too far however can overheat the coil and result in coil damage or failure so we do need to treat this with a little bit of care. |
| 16:18 | If we click on our drop down menu you can see we've got three options here, we've got time, which is dwell time plus adjustments, we've got time which is a table which is what we're going to be using and we've got duty cycle. |
| 16:28 | In most instances our time table is the option that we would be using so we'll go back to that. |
| 16:35 | We also have a setting or parameter here for our minimum discharge time. |
| 16:39 | Now we'll see, we've got this set a 1ms and essentially this is something we can find problems with if we're using a distributor setup on a high RPM application, there may be insufficient time, essentially for the coil to fully charge before it needs to fire again and this is the minimum discharge time to ensure that the spark actually will reliably occur and Maxx here don't recommend setting this below about half a millisecond. |
| 17:05 | In our case, with our coil on plug arrangement and a relatively modest RPM ceiling, this is certainly not going to be an issue. |
| 17:12 | We'll come down now to our output polarity and this is actually a very very important aspect with any ECU configuration and particularly on the Honda here, this is also one of the reasons why I recommend when we are doing this configuration, it's a good idea to start with, in particular the coils unplugged. |
| 17:31 | So this essentially tells the ECU whether the coils are going to be charged by switching to high voltage or switching to ground. |
| 17:39 | If you've got this parameter set incorrectly, the problem with it is that you will end up almost certainly burning out the coils. |
| 17:47 | Now this is particular to the Honda as well because in stock form, if we were using the factory distributor and single coil, Honda actually go the opposite to most vehicles and their output polarity is actually inverted so let's have a quick look here. |
| 18:04 | We've got normal or inverted and you see Maxx here refer this to use only with CDI ignition systems and that's absolutely correct most CDI ignition systems will require an inverted polarity but as I mentioned, some Honda as well as some Ford, so really important to understand the ignition system requirements for your vehicle and make sure that you set this correctly and that needs to be done before the coils are plugged in so again, we'll go back to normal, that suits our aftermarket coil on plug arrangement but if we were setting up a stock B18C, we would have that as the inverted setting. |
| 18:41 | Output voltage here, not a lot to really need to know here, 5V which is for most coils and 12V is something that we won't be using here, very few instances where that would be required. |
| 18:53 | Lastly for our ignition system we have our dwell table so this table is 2D relative to our battery voltage and essentially the idea here is that as our battery voltage is lower, there's less energy available to charge the coil so we need to extend our dwell time. |
| 19:09 | For common coils, you'll be able to find information on the correct dwell time on the internet with relative ease, however just as a bit of a sanity check, at 14V which of course should be our normal operating voltage, we typically see our dwell time somewhere in the region of about 2.5 to maybe 3.5 milliseconds so we can see here, this is set to 3 ms so we're in that range and we're good to move on. |
| 19:35 | Next we're going to close down our ignition setup and we're going to come down here to our inputs, we'll click on that and there's a few parameters here to deal with. |
| 19:47 | First of all we have our trigger and home inputs, we're going to deal with these because they are quite critical, we're going to deal with these in a separate module so we're going to ignore those for the moment. |
| 19:58 | Coming down here we've got our sensors for coolant temperature, intake air temperature and throttle position so these are some of our core sensors that we must have set up so let's have a quick look at these. |
| 20:09 | So first of all we've got our IAT or intake air temperature settings and we can choose our intake air temperature sensor type. |
| 20:17 | Again an extensive list of options from the dropdown menu, we can see we've got an HV electronics temp sensor which is selected. |
| 20:25 | If you have a sensor that isn't defined, you can of course come up to the top here and click on user defined sensor and you'll simply need to calibrate that sensor to suit. |
| 20:35 | Using one of the pre defined sensors takes a little bit of the complexity out here, makes our life nice and easy. |
| 20:41 | Next up we've got our pull up resistor so this is important with a thermistor style temperature sensor because they are two wire and they do require an internal pull up to 5V in order to operate. |
| 20:55 | So this would be typical to use our internal pull up resistor, it is default as it mentions here. |
| 21:01 | However if you are piggybacking a factory ECU and you are sharing the signal from a temp sensor with a factory ECU you're going to need to disable the internal pull up resistor, otherwise that will affect the reading that both the factory and MaxxECUs are seeing so we'll go back to our default there and then we've also got the ability to have an IAT failsafe or failure detection and we see that we have got that enabled and we can offset the sensor as well, the reading if required. |
| 21:35 | We'll have a look at our coolant temperature and then we'll do a bit of a sanity check on these readings. |
| 21:38 | The coolant temperature really is essentially identical as what we've just seen here. |
| 21:42 | You can see this time we are using a Bosch temperature sensor, probably one of the most common calibrations we come across. |
| 21:49 | We've got the same internal pull up resistor as default and we've got our fail safe and failure detection is also enabled. |
| 21:58 | Now with both our coolant and air temperatures configured, we can make sure that these are reading properly and do a bit of a sanity check here. |
| 22:05 | It's easiest to do this if the engine hasn't been running. |
| 22:09 | Obviously in this instance there would be no heat in the cooling system and what we should be looking for here is both our air temperature and our coolant temperature to be within a degree or two of each other and within a degree or so of our ambient temperature. |
| 22:23 | So let's have a look at that and if we come down to our general tuning bar down the bottom we can see we've got our coolant temperature here sitting at 19.5, 19.6°. |
| 22:33 | We don't actually have our intake air temperature being displayed at the moment but we can do this by right clicking on that bar and clicking on add or remove items. |
| 22:42 | This gives us a full list of all of our parameters here and what we want to do here is find our intake air temperature and we can click on the little tick box and that will enable it. |
| 22:55 | It's also possible here to simply type in the parameter you're looking for because you may not know exactly where that is and that will just bring up that particular option so we'll click OK here and now we've got our intake air temperature and our coolant temperature, you can see that they're both sitting essentially right on 20° and that's about right for our current ambient so we know that those are reading correctly, we can trust them. |
| 23:22 | Lastly here on our main sensors we're going to look at our throttle position sensor or TPS. |
| 23:28 | Now this is an old fashioned cable throttle, nothing particularly flash, we've got a single sensor here wired to the ECU and we can see that this is selected as TPS sensor for mechanical throttle, again we've got the option to choose from a drop down menu here. |
| 23:45 | So very very simple to configure here. |
| 23:48 | All we want to do is make sure the throttle is properly closed and what we can do is simply click on get current voltage and we see that that actually changed the closed throttle voltage. |
| 23:58 | Likewise we'll go to wide open throttle here and I'll just do this while we're going through the demonstration, again make sure we're holding it properly at wide open throttle and click get current value. |
| 24:08 | And again we did see a small change there to the voltage. |
| 24:11 | Now again as a bit of a sanity check, if we come down to our bar at the bottom here, we do have our throttle position being displayed, we want to make sure that we are truly seeing 0% when the throttle is closed and we want, as we move the throttle to make sure that this is moving nice and smoothly and again we want to make sure that we are seeing a true 100% throttle when we are wide open. |
| 24:33 | Now a couple of things I'll just add here. |
| 24:35 | Particularly if we've got an engine swap and things may not be quite like the parent car or factory car like we've got here. |
| 24:43 | It is also worthwhile doing a bit of a sanity check, removing the intake system and physically making sure that at wide open throttle at the pedal we are in fact getting the throttle butterfly all the way open, very easy to make assumptions that that's the case and end up with the throttle plate not all the way open and artificially reducing our airflow into the engine. |
| 25:03 | The other element here to make sure we don't overlook is our throttle closed so let's just go back to a false value here and before we actually set this, I think we had a value of about 0.620V so we'll just set that. |
| 25:19 | Now that is going to show us a throttle position of 0% , closed but while I open the throttle, it does take about 2-3% of throttle movement before it actually starts budging so what that's going to do is cause a lot of problems with our idle control and our transition off idle so we want to make sure, we'll click get current setting again, we want to make sure that when we are actually doing this little test here and we're looking at our throttle position that the moment we touch the throttle we actually start seeing that throttle position percentage change. |
| 25:51 | Now at wide open throttle, the other little tip I'll give you here is that particularly if you're doing this setup and the car's in a million pieces and maybe you've got the laptop outside of the vehicle, and you're doing this by hand because there's no driver's seat for example, it's very difficult to apply the same sort of force with your hand when you're doing the setup as you can with your foot and particularly in the heat of battle out on a racetrack, most drivers will be pushing really hard on that pedal so it's important to make sure that when you do that wide open throttle setting that the throttle is being pressed very firmly and that you are truly getting wide open throttle. |
| 26:27 | Alright we've got our main settings there for our sensors configured so let's move down our menu structure now. |
| 26:33 | Our next setting here is for our lambda sensor and the MaxxECU Race does have the ability to run an onboard lambda sensor so we'll click on that and have a look through our settings. |
| 26:43 | We've got in this instance a single setting, of course if we look at our dropdown menu we can have multiple sensors, in this case up to two anyway which would be ideal for a V bank configuration engine. |
| 26:55 | That's not what we've got so we've got a single sensor. |
| 26:57 | Lambda sensor A in this case is from our internal wideband controller channel one but again we've got a variety of different options and how we can get that lambda into the ECU. |
| 27:09 | We are going to set up our sensor warm up to be on engine startup which again if we look at our drop down menu we can have this on ECU startup which will warm the sensor before the engine starts which is great for getting data as soon as we're starting the engine for cold start tuning, for cranking enrichment etc. |
| 27:28 | However, this can end up shortening the sensor life so what we want to do is either use engine startup there or delayed startup so we'll go back to our engine startup setting there. |
| 27:41 | For our internal wideband sensor here we do need to select the sensor type and if we look at our drop down menu, the MaxxECU will support either the LSU Bosch 4.2 or 4.9 sensor. |
| 27:53 | Why this is important here is that if we have selected the wrong sensor this can end up damaging the sensor, these sensors are expensive so we want to make sure that this is right before we get started. |
| 28:04 | This really comes back to what I was saying about the ignition system as well. |
| 28:08 | It's important with some of these settings to make sure that they're correct and configured in the ECU properly before we actually go and plug in all of these sensors which is why I'm a big fan of essentially starting with minimal sensors plugged in while we're going through the configuration or sensors and actuators I should say. |
| 28:25 | Our next option down here is our calibration mode and in this case we're using the default automatic calibration which uses the calibration resistor built into these sensors. |
| 28:35 | In our drop down menu we can also use manual calibration adjustment if required. |
| 28:40 | Our last option here is our pressure correction and the lambda sensors are actually sensitive to back pressure in the exhaust system, something that the majority of people overlook and if the sensor is fitted post turbocharger which is where it would normally be in the exhaust system, usually this is just fine. |
| 28:59 | However pre turbocharger, the back pressure can be quite significant and compensation can be required so here you can choose whether you're using no pressure compensation which would be typical or a pressure correction. |
| 29:11 | Alright next we're going to move down to our analog inputs setup, we'll expand that out and this allows us to set up some additional inputs over and above what we've looked at already. |
| 29:23 | We can see we've got the ability to set up two auxiliary temp sensor or temperature inputs and we've got six analog 0-5V inputs. |
| 29:34 | We're only using three of these here and essentially they're all very similar. |
| 29:36 | We'll have a look at them anyway, let's click on analog input three, 0-5V pressure sensor inputs. |
| 29:43 | So first of all, we've got a description for this sensor and what it's being used as. |
| 29:48 | 0-5V as I've already mentioned, we can click on this though and we can reconfigure this if we want to set it up as a digital or frequency input. |
| 29:56 | That's not what we're using so we'll stick to 0-5V. |
| 29:59 | Now under our analog input setup menu here we can see first of all the class for the sensor, what is it and in this case I've already got it configured as an external manifold absolute pressure sensor measuring in kPa. |
| 30:12 | Again an extensive list in our drop down menu here of what we can choose, we're going to stick to what we've got there, our external map sensor and then the sensor itself, in this case we can see we've got pre configured a MAP sensor for Honda series D, B, H and F engines so this is just the configuration for the factory Honda MAP sensor that is mounted on the inlet manifold. |
| 30:34 | Nothing too tricky there. |
| 30:35 | Again, huge list of pre configured sensors or alternatively, as we'll look at shortly we can set up a user defined sensor so we're not going to do that though, leave it as it is. |
| 30:45 | Moving down to our input settings here, and the first of these is our filtering. |
| 30:51 | So this, as its name implies will filter the signal. |
| 30:54 | The more we filter it, the smoother the signal is, however it's also going to add some latency or delay to that signal. |
| 31:01 | Particularly on something mission critical such as the manifold pressure sensor, it can tend to be a little bit noisy, however we don't want to apply more filtering that necessary because it will slow down the function of that sensor so I would suggest either starting with no filtering or maybe a very low filtering such as four, the higher the number essentially the more filtering that will be applied there. |
| 31:23 | We can also set our sensor supply tracking which essentially just defines which 5V rail the sensor is connected to and then we can select our resolution here so just the resolution of the sensor, how many decimal places we've got, if we click on our drop down menu we can see our options, we've got one, 0.1, through to 0.001. |
| 31:45 | In this case, for a manifold pressure sensor, one decimal place is absolutely perfect for our resolution there so we're going to leave it there and lastly we can apply a offset to our adjustment if required so what we want to do here, in some instances there may be a requirement to offset this a little bit. |
| 32:03 | It's always a good idea as a bit of a sanity check just to see what our manifold absolute pressure is, we can see that sitting at about 95.8 kPa. |
| 32:10 | That's about right considering we are at a little bit of altitude here in Queenstown. |
| 32:15 | We can come to our real time values display and if we just type into this little search box, baro, it's going to pop up with our barometric air pressure which we can see currently sitting at 95.4 so they're matching quite nicely so we're happy with that. |
| 32:28 | So that covers our sensor setup, we can also set up some error detection here as well. |
| 32:35 | At the moment you see this is disabled, little bit of this comes down to personal preference but we can set up a fail safe value here or we could add an error code or fail safe with an error code. |
| 32:46 | With the fail safe, what we can do now is set a high and low voltage. |
| 32:49 | So essentially if the voltage goes above or below 0.1 and 4.9V the ECU will detect that sensor to be faulty and this would happen if maybe the sensor is shorted straight out or maybe it's become unplugged in which case it'll be sitting at 0V and then finally we can set a output value that the ECU will use if it's in fault. |
| 33:09 | This is a little tricky because it's never going to be right but you can use it as some kind of a limp home functionality, maybe you might want to set this somewhere around about maybe 60 kPa or 70 kPa, that may be enough just to be able to limp the car to a position where you can actually figure out what's wrong with it and fix it. |
| 33:29 | So that's our manifold pressure sensor. |
| 33:31 | Coming down here, we've also got two additional pressure sensors. |
| 33:34 | Most of this is exactly what you've already seen, we've got our engine oil pressure sensor here. |
| 33:40 | This I won't go over everything but this is a AEM 0-100 psi sensor so pre configured again from our drop down menu. |
| 33:48 | In a moment we'll look at how we can use a user defined sensor if we don't have a pre configured option. |
| 33:55 | Filtering or input setups I should say, essentially all the same as what we've already looked at and same with our error detection. |
| 34:03 | Let's move down and we'll look at our fuel pressure sensor here and in this instance, what we will do is pre configure or sorry user configure this so we know that it is an AEM 0-100 psi sensor but let's set this up as a user defined sensor. |
| 34:18 | All of our input settings remain the same, the error detection remains the same but now we have our sensor calibration table. |
| 34:26 | Now first of all, we've got our sensor value type, in this case this is a relative pressure style sensor and we've got the ability to set up our calibration here. |
| 34:36 | Most of these pressure sensors work in the same way in that the calibration is a two point calibration. |
| 34:42 | Generally between 0.5 and 4.5V, those would represent the minimum and maximum output so let's click on two point calibration. |
| 34:52 | And we can see our minimum value here, 0 kPa at 0.5V, alternatively we can get the current voltage but we're not going to need to do that. |
| 35:02 | Maximum value here, we can see we've got 689, this is calibration in kPa so 689 kPa is the same as 100 psi and that of course occurs at 4.5V so we click OK and that will give our calibration so essentially a user defined variant of getting exactly what we just looked at with the pre defined option. |
| 35:23 | Alright so at this point we can also check that those sensors are reading something sensible and again if we look at our real time values we can see those being displayed here so remembering our first one, analog input three, that's our map sensor, 95.8 kPa. |
| 35:40 | At this stage both our fuel and oil pressure sensors are reading zero, pretty typical because the engine hasn't been running so we're going to be able to check those a little bit later on. |
| 35:49 | Now that we've got our base configuration complete and our inputs set up and tested as far as possible, we'll move down to our outputs. |
| 35:57 | We'll start by closing down or shrinking down the inputs menu tree and we'll expand out the outputs and click on output configuration. |
| 36:04 | This gives us a list of all of our available outputs. |
| 36:07 | Starting at the top here we've got our general purpose outputs on the ECU itself and we can see we're not really using too many of these, there is one here that I'll just mention which is our lambda sensor heater circuit and this is for our onboard lambda control. |
| 36:23 | Moving down, we'll just scroll down a little bit, our next setup here is for our injector output functions, of course we already know we've got a four cylinder engine with four individual injectors that are being driven so of course we've got our first four of these set up as injector output drives. |
| 36:41 | Point to note here, as with most ECUs any unused injector or ignition drives, we can reconfigure these as any auxiliary outputs for anything else we may want to run. |
| 36:51 | Likewise, we've got exactly the same here for our ignition output functions. |
| 36:55 | Now typically of course with the factory B18C, given that it is a single coil, we would only need a single output for our coil on plug, we are of course using four of our ignition drives and again none of our auxiliary or extra ignition drives are being used for any other purpose. |
| 37:12 | Now I did say that we won't really be covering the PDM and that is going to be the case however we can see our PDM outputs and we do need to discuss these in a little bit of detail here. |
| 37:22 | So these really as far as our example goes here are no different to any of our other auxiliary outputs. |
| 37:30 | We've got our fuel pump relay and our radiator fan as our first two.. |
| 37:33 | Starter motor control is actually being controlled through the ECU as well which I will not be covering in detail as well as power steering and then we've of course got our VTEC control solenoids. |
| 37:45 | So really the VTEC control fuel pump and radiator are what we're most interested in here. |
| 37:49 | So this is just configured as I mentioned just like it's any auxiliary output on the ECU anyway. |
| 37:54 | Great thing with this is that once it's set up we can click the little test button and in our case what we should hear is the fuel pump run so let's just test that now. |
| 38:05 | OK so it runs the pump for a second there and actually this is an opportunity here to also look at our real time values and we can see that our AN volt seven, which is our fuel pressure, that had jumped up when the pump was running we'll click test again, we can see that clicks up to just under 300 kPa which is where we want it to be so that proves that that is working. |
| 38:26 | Likewise we can do exactly the same for our radiator fan, if we click test, the radiator fan in the engine bay will run, very difficult to hear on our recording here but I can hear that it's working. |
| 38:38 | This gives us a chance to also test the polarity or the wiring of that, making sure that the fan is actually operating the correct way and likewise we can test our VTEC solenoid and we will hear that click. |
| 38:50 | So that allows us to test as we are setting these up. |
| 38:54 | Let's have a look in a little bit more detail at some of these outputs here and if we click on the left hand side on our user output one VTEC for example, we'll just go over this, you'll see this being adjusted as required as we go through the worked example. |
| 39:08 | So we can give the user output a description, in this case of course we're calling it VTEC, not too creative but it allows us to at a glance know what this is. |
| 39:18 | We've got some conditions around how this output will function and in this case, condition one is our first one which is our RPM. |
| 39:26 | Of course we want to be triggering this on RPM or at a certain RPM. |
| 39:31 | Important with something like VTEC or any switched cam system however, we want to incorporate some hysteresis which simply means that the switch on and switch off points are not exactly the same. |
| 39:43 | And this prevents, if we happen to be at the VTEC changeover RPM, it prevents it from shuttling on and off at a high frequency which sounds horrible and also can make the engine a little bit erratic and difficult to drive. |
| 39:55 | So for that, we want to make sure we are choosing the greater than with hysteresis option and if we click on our little drop down menu we can see all of the options are available but we want to make sure we're using greater than with hysteresis, not just greater than. |
| 40:08 | So for a start, let's just select 4000 RPM. |
| 40:12 | From experience I know that our VTEC changeover point's likely to be somewhere in that 4000, 4500 RPM range and that's going to be just fine. |
| 40:21 | Now we've got our hysteresis value here which I've set at 50 RPM so basically it's going to switch at 4000 RPM, it'll have to drop to 3950 before it switches off. |
| 40:32 | Generally for something like this, hysteresis of 50 to 100 RPM is just fine. |
| 40:37 | You do need to be mindful of depending how you're controlling the fuel and ignition tables which I'll go into in more detail later on, if you have a larger hysteresis of maybe 300 or 500 RPM, there can be some inconsistencies in your volumetric efficiency table because the VE table won't match the actual engine VE because of the VTEC being active or inactive. |
| 40:59 | Again I'll deal with this in a little bit more detail as we go into the actual tuning. |
| 41:05 | Now condition B, we've got below and we may not need to use this, we may choose to just keep this very simple and make it RPM alone. |
| 41:14 | However we can also incorporate something like manifold absolute pressure or throttle position into this as well. |
| 41:20 | If you're going to do so, again you want to make sure that you are using hysteresis in here, at the moment I've got this set at 75 kPa so basically the VTEC will switch when we are above 75 kPa and 4000 RPM, we've got a 5 kPa hysteresis here. |
| 41:35 | Then we can set up our output configuration. |
| 41:38 | We can set this output to function when both A and B are true which is what we want in this case. |
| 41:46 | There are a variety of options here. |
| 41:48 | For our worked example though, again just to keep things really nice and clean, I'm just going to set this a little bit more simply and we'll just make it purely based on RPM so we'll take our load out of the equation. |
| 42:01 | So we've also got the ability to set delays. |
| 42:04 | Now in this instance we would absolutely not want any delay, we want to make sure that our VTEC switches immediately. |
| 42:11 | In some instances though, you may want to delay the turn on or turn off for a period of time, you can do that. |
| 42:18 | You can also select your output, whether this is going to be normal or inverted, essentially whether the VTEC is going to be powered and then switch off or alternatively the other way around. |
| 42:27 | We of course want this to be normal. |
| 42:30 | Now the other option is to have an output flash. |
| 42:33 | Now again you could be using this to control and LED light or something of that nature, obviously we don't want that to flash. |
| 42:40 | We've also got the ability to control this, an additional input to control this and again we aren't going to be using that function so that's how we've got our setup there for our VTEC control. |
| 42:52 | Lastly let's just jump up and have a look at our radiator fan control, nothing too complicated there, we've already proven that the fan actually runs but this is how it's going to be set or operate in use. |
| 43:04 | So we've got our start temperature here so essentially it will turn on initially above 88°. |
| 43:10 | Again just like our VTEC there, we've got a hysteresis to this as well so that the fan doesn't cycle on and off at that point. |
| 43:19 | So we've got 2° there, 2-4° is about right for the hysteresis in most instances. |
| 43:23 | What it means of course is it will switch on at 88° but the temperature will have to drop down by the 2° hysteresis to 86 before it will switch back off. |
| 43:32 | If you've got a speed sensor wired up as well you can set the fan to switch off above a certain road speed. |
| 43:40 | Typically the fan is of little to no use above about 60 to 70 km/h so in that case you can disable the fan if required. |
| 43:49 | If you are using air conditioning you can also run this fan when the air/con is active as well. |
| 43:56 | If you don't have a separate A/C fan. |
| 43:58 | And then you can also disable the fan when the engine is off. |
| 44:02 | This allows you to also set up a post shutdown cooling, in other words run the fan on if you require or if you'd like to, this does also require an ECU power hold relay functionality to allow that. |
| 44:17 | Now at this point we have set up our injector and our ignition drive but you'll recall we haven't tested those. |
| 44:24 | And if we just come back to our output configuration menu at the moment, you can see that we don't actually have a test option here for our injector outputs and likewise if we scroll down, we don't have this for our ignition outputs. |
| 44:39 | It's always recommended to actually test these functions and make sure that your wiring is actually correct and what I mean by this is that the injector output that the ECU thinks is going to cylinder one, is in fact wired up to the injector on cylinder one. |
| 44:55 | Likewise for our ignition coils. |
| 44:57 | With the injectors, the engine will run if we have our order around the wrong way, although of course our injection timing would not be correct. |
| 45:05 | On the other hand, if we have our ignition coils wired incorrectly this could cause some problems that will create a bit of a diagnostic issue when it comes time to start up. |
| 45:14 | So what we can do here is if we just shut down our outputs menu and we come back down to our diagnostics menu here and we can see we have a option here for injection and ignition output test. |
| 45:27 | So first of all we have the ability to set up this test, we can choose the test sequence and this is at the moment the selected outputs. |
| 45:36 | So this makes it really easy because we can be quite specific on what outputs we're testing. |
| 45:40 | The output frequency, now we want this to be something relatively low simply so we can hear it, somewhere around about 5-10 Hz is sufficient. |
| 45:48 | We can choose an injector pulse width and we can also choose an ignition dwell time and of course with the ignition dwell time in particular, we want to be making sure that this is low enough that we're not going to actually risk damaging the coil. |
| 46:04 | For the injection outputs we can choose whether we're running our primary or our auxiliary outputs. |
| 46:09 | Of course here we only have primary injection so not really an issue. |
| 46:13 | Then we've got tick boxes here to simply choose which of our injector and ignition outputs we're going to be testing. |
| 46:21 | Couple of words of caution here, with the injection test we want to make sure that we aren't actually injecting fuel into the engine so it's important to make sure that we don't have the fuel system primed. |
| 46:31 | Good idea here is to just disable the fuel pump before we start running this test, otherwise we risk ending up filling up the engine with fuel. |
| 46:40 | It's also advisable here to have a helper with you so you can run this test from inside the car and the helper in the engine bay can actually physically confirm by listening, which of the outputs is actually operating. |
| 46:52 | With both the injection and ignition test, a good way of doing this is to run one output, let's say cylinder one and then physically unplug and plug in the coil or the injector so you can physically hear it clicking and then when you disable it or unplug it I should say, that will go away so that's really easy to make sure you've got the right cylinder. |
| 47:13 | Generally even with the ignition coils you will be able to actually hear that spark occurring inside the cylinder, it does require a little bit of quiet in order to be able to do that. |
| 47:24 | Alternatively you can remove the coil from the engine or the ignition lead, you can temporarily connect that to another spark plug, make sure that that spark plug is earthed out on the engine or rocker cover and run that test and you'll physically be able to see the spark occurring. |
| 47:38 | Let's just have a quick look at this in action. |
| 47:41 | Let's come down to our injector output for cylinder one test, we'll click on that little box there and we'll click start test and we should be able to hear that particular cylinder now clicking away, the injector for that cylinder clicking away in the engine bay, once we've confirmed that we can click stop test and we're good to go. |
| 47:58 | Of course here it would be a rinse and repeat for the remaining ignition and injection outputs. |
| 48:04 | So this is the process we go through setting up our outputs and you'll just repeat this for any additional outputs you are running. |
| 48:13 | Testing them to make sure that they are functioning as expected. |
| 48:16 | At this point with our relatively simple installation here on a very basic naturally aspirated engine, there's really not a lot more for us to do, so we can move on with the next step of our process. |
