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Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing

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Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing

09.38

00:00 - So the first step with any ECU is configuring it.
00:03 Now as we've already talked about with the Motec M150, it's a dedicated plug and play ECU for the Toyota 86.
00:11 A lot of the options which we'd normally need to configure and set up are locked down, we don't need to adjust them, there's no adjustment there for us to make in some cases.
00:20 So that makes our job a lot easier.
00:22 it also means you're missing some of the crucial steps that you would see on a normal plug and play ECU or a standalone aftermarket engine management system.
00:32 What I'm going to do is just work through a couple of the things we've already looked at, and also one of the other aspects which we didn't, just to give you an idea of how that setup gets done in the ECU.
00:45 Now remember it's not the specifics that's important here, it's the process behind it and that process can be ported across to any type of ECU, you just need to get used to how each ECU's software works.
00:58 So we're gonna start by revisiting an area we've already looked at which was the throttle position sensor setup.
01:03 So if we look at the software and we go through to the initial setup screen.
01:09 And we go through to throttle pedal, we've got all of the parameters down here for the throttle pedal setting.
01:15 Motec make this nice and easy.
01:17 The only two parameters we need to adjust here are the throttle pedal sensor main offset.
01:23 Now that basically measures the voltage that the throttle pedal sensor's providing when the throttle pedal's closed.
01:30 So all we need to do is go to that setting, take our foot off the throttle and press the Q key, and you can see I've already go that set up, 0.657 volts.
01:40 The next step is we go to the throttle pedal sensor main scale parameter.
01:46 And basically that's giving the ECU information about the scaling of the voltage versus pedal travel.
01:52 So all we need to do there is go to full throttle.
01:54 We make sure that we're holding the throttle hard on the ground, press the Q key again, and that locks in that change.
02:02 Now as we talked about, if we go back into the tuning screen and you can see we've got the throttle position sensor output here.
02:10 And if we now go between open and closed throttle, you can see it moving smoothly.
02:15 Now that's one thing we wanna look for.
02:17 We want to make sure that that setting, once we've adjusted it, is moving smoothly, it's not erratic and is going between fully open and fully closed.
02:27 I'll just point out, this car is equipped with an electronic throttle body.
02:30 That's why you can see when the throttle's closed we're actually sitting at around about 14%.
02:35 The ECU's using that for idle speed control as well.
02:39 I'm not going to touch on the drive by wire or electronic throttle control settings.
02:44 That's really a more advanced topic.
02:46 We're just gonna treat this engine as if it's got a normal throttle body on it.
02:50 So that takes care of the throttle position sensor.
02:52 Now we've also added a couple of additional sensors to the break out loom on this ECU.
02:58 I'm just gonna quickly talk through how we'd set those up.
03:02 So those two sensors are for fuel pressure and oil pressure.
03:06 So if we go back into our initial setup screen, and you can see we've got here a screen to set up our optional sensors.
03:16 Now this lists a bunch of different sensors that you can set the ECU up with.
03:21 So the two that we've got are fuel pressure and oil pressure.
03:25 Now if we scroll down, I'll just move this across so we can see a little bit clearer.
03:30 And fuel pressure is down here, it's actually already measuring 340 kPa.
03:35 So we've got down here a little bit further, our fuel pressure sensor voltage resource.
03:44 So basically what that means is that's the pin on the ECU that the fuel pressure sensor is connected to.
03:51 In this case it's analog voltage input nine.
03:54 If we had it somewhere else, we can open that screen and we can change it to a different pin, but in this case that's where we've got it.
04:01 So the other parameter we need to adjust there is our fuel pressure sensor calibration.
04:06 Now this particular sensor has a 0.5 to 4.5 volt range.
04:12 And you can see here at 0.5 volts we've got zero kPa.
04:16 And at 4.5 volts the output's 1034 kPa.
04:20 So we enter that and basically that's set up.
04:23 If we go back to the tuning screen, we can see fuel pressure is measured here, 340 kPa.
04:32 Now the ECU's gonna use that parameter for the fuel injector configuration.
04:38 Looking where it's going to look in the fuel injector linearisation table for the fuel pressure reference.
04:45 OK we'll just pop back to our setup there.
04:48 And the other setting we've got is our oil pressure, which we'll actually get to through the all calibrate menu.
04:56 And if we enter oil pressure here, we have our engine oil pressure sensor.
05:05 I'll just again expand that out so we can see it a bit clearer.
05:09 And you can see that the voltage resource for that particular sensor is analog voltage input 8.
05:15 Now basically this is an identical sensor.
05:17 So if we go up to the sensor calibration, you can see we've got exactly that same table.
05:22 If we press F6 it expands out so we're focusing just on this table and its' exactly the same calibration as the fuel pressure sensor we just looked at.
05:32 You can see our current oil pressure is sitting at 1.5 kPa, basically the engine's not running so it's pretty close to zero.
05:42 OK the next thing I want to show you in a little bit more detail is the injector configuration.
05:47 Now as I said in the main body of the course, the M150 deals with injector calibration in quite a sophisticated way.
05:55 And it's worth having a look at how that's done.
05:58 So if we jump through to the injector page, what we've got in this particular engine is it runs a direct injection injector as well as a port injector.
06:08 Now the direct injector is listed as a primary injector.
06:12 And the secondary injector is the port injector.
06:16 So in the software we can configure a cross over to define what percentage of each injector's being used.
06:23 That's an advanced system, there's not very many engines that even run that.
06:28 And that principal doesn't really matter.
06:30 What we're looking at is how the injectors are set up and how we actually tune the engines.
06:35 So from now on we're going to basically treat this like a normal engine, we're going to forget that it's got those two injectors.
06:41 I just wanted to explain that's how this particular engine works.
06:45 So if we look down here we've got some parameters for the flow out of the injector.
06:50 So we've got a reference flow, and in the case of our secondary injector, which is our port injector, we've got 3.3 mils per second.
07:00 The primary injectors or the direct injectors at 12.5 mils per second.
07:04 It's also important for the ECU to know what fuel pressure that rated flow was measured at.
07:10 So again in the case of the direct injector, that was measured at 10 megapascals and for the port injectors that's measured at 400 kPA or four bar.
07:22 We've also got a setting here for minimum fuel quantity.
07:25 So this is basically the minimum amount of fuel that each of those injectors can deliver.
07:30 So in terms of the direct injectors, that's three micro litres.
07:36 And the port injectors it's gone all the way down to zero.
07:39 So that's one parameter that needs to be set up.
07:42 With particularly port injectors, normal fuel injectors as we know them, there's quite a large area of non linear flow that needs to be configured as well.
07:53 And the Motec deals with this in a really special way with the injector linearisation table.
07:58 So you can think of this in modern ECUs, most ECUs deal with this with a battery compensation or injector dead time table.
08:07 Motec goes a little further and it actually has a table of linearisation so the ECU knows exactly what pulse width to deliver to the injector in order to get a certain measured amount of fuel out of it.
08:20 You can see it's a four dimensional table, we've got battery voltage here, so we've got basically separate tables at eight, 10, 12, 14, and 15 volts.
08:30 And then we've got fuel pressure here and our injector output.
08:34 So this information's not something you can come up with, this is configured by Motec to suit the factory injectors.
08:41 If you swap to an aftermarket injector, you need to be getting the information related to the particular injectors you're fitting so that you can properly fill out these tables.
08:52 And without that information correctly entered, the ECU's fuel model isn't going to work properly and you're not going to get the best results.
09:03 Now once we've got all of the inputs and outputs configured and set up, we'd normally go through and test each input and output individually.
09:11 Now again because this is a plug and play ECU really closely tied into the Toyota FA20 engine, and the Toyota 86, that's not strictly necessary, we don't really have to test this because it's all been done.
09:24 If you want to go through and test it, we showed in the main body of the course how that can be done.
09:30 We know this is all set up and working properly, so we can basically jump through to the next step.

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