Road Tuning: Step 1 - ECU Configuration, Input and Output Testing
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Step 1 - ECU Configuration, Input and Output Testing
16.39
| 00:00 | - Now while the ECU we've got in this Altezza is a plug and play, and it comes preconfigured, you can literally put it in the car, turn the key and start it. |
| 00:08 | We're going to go back a few steps and just talk through the initial ECU configuration and the input and output testing. |
| 00:15 | Even with a plug and play ECU, I still recommend starting at the start, going through these steps, and just making sure everything is working exactly how you expect. |
| 00:25 | So we start with the ECU configuration and we'll just have a look at that now. |
| 00:30 | We go into the configuration menu. |
| 00:32 | You can see the basic configurations in the G4 Plus software. |
| 00:36 | So we start with the number of cylinders and the fact it's a four-stroke engine. |
| 00:40 | So none of that needs to be changed there. |
| 00:43 | We can also move down to the firing order table. |
| 00:46 | Now this is a typical four-cylinder engine with a one, three, four, two firing order. |
| 00:52 | Now why that's important is, particularly in the Link G4 or G4 Plus, We wire the injectors number one injector output to number one cylinder, number two output to number two cylinder, and so on. |
| 01:04 | The ECU uses this firing order table to decide which order to trigger both the injectors and the ignition system. |
| 01:14 | This is one of the first places you really want to concentrate on getting that correct, and otherwise you're going to have a lot of problems when it comes to actually getting the engine going. |
| 01:25 | Okay, so from there on we're going to have a look at some of the analog inputs to the ECU, and again, these come preset. |
| 01:33 | We're just going to talk through a couple of examples as well. |
| 01:36 | If we type AN into the ECU settings search box you can see a list of all the analog voltage inputs to the ECU. |
| 01:44 | Now one that we're just going to have a look at here is the foot position sensor, main. |
| 01:51 | Now that's wired up to part of the E throttle foot pedal position sensor, and it's important for the ECU to get that information so that it can do the electronic throttle settings. |
| 02:03 | Now if we press R to get the run time values set menu, you can see the voltage input that that particular analog voltage input is receiving, and we can see that here on the AN volt three foot pedal position main voltage. |
| 02:19 | So with the throttle closed, we're sitting at 0.6 volts, and if we move through to full throttle, that smoothly increases up to four volts. |
| 02:29 | Okay, so we can set these analog voltage inputs to basically whatever we want and another one that we'll just look at here is analog voltage eight, which we have set up for our Innovate LM-2 wide band meter. |
| 02:43 | So we've gone into analog volt eight and there's a bunch of items already set up in here that you can choose from that are preconfigured labels. |
| 02:53 | So we've gone down and we've selected lambda one. |
| 02:57 | Now we've also had to choose a calibration for this particular input, and this calibration, there is actually a calibration already set up for the Innovate LC-1. |
| 03:10 | We could choose that. |
| 03:12 | Just because I'm really fussy, what I did was actually made up my own calibration table here, which I've called cal four. |
| 03:19 | We can go and have a look at that. |
| 03:21 | Here we've got the input to the analog voltage eight channel, so it goes between zero and five volts. |
| 03:29 | We're outputting in units of lambda, and at zero volts the output is 0.495 lambda, and at five volts is 1.495. |
| 03:41 | Now I've just adjusted that calibration until the ECU was seeing exactly the same numbers that our LM-2 wide band meter was displaying. |
| 03:49 | Okay, the other one we did go through in the course material was how to configure the electronic throttle body, but we'll just go through that again. |
| 03:59 | So that's important before we go any further, and if we go to the E throttle setup menu we can access that. |
| 04:06 | Now first of all we want to put the E throttle into setup mode, which allows us to actually make adjustments to it, and the ECU has some preconfigured calibration modes to go through in order to calibrate the foot pedal position and the throttle butterfly position. |
| 04:23 | If we click on those, we can just follow the instructions on the screen, and basically that will automatically calibrate the sensor. |
| 04:36 | So you can see here, once we've done that, the throttle position now on the screen is moving nice and smoothly between closed throttle and wide-open throttle. |
| 04:43 | We can do the same for the throttle position or butterfly position sensor. |
| 04:49 | This actually does it automatically. |
| 04:50 | The ECU just drives the throttle butterfly through its movements and automatically calibrates. |
| 04:55 | Once that's done it'll tell you it's achieved a calibration and everything's okay. |
| 05:01 | One thing we want to do. |
| 05:03 | We want to make sure once we've done this that we put the E throttle mode back into on. |
| 05:09 | So that gives us some safety parameters. |
| 05:11 | If anything goes outside of normal parameters, the ECU will clamp the engine RPM at 1800 and it prevents any possible sort of damage to the car or yourself because there's been a fault on that E throttle setup. |
| 05:25 | So obviously you can have any number of inputs, and you may have ones for exhaust gas temperature, maybe some auxiliary pressure sensors. |
| 05:35 | The process for setting these up is the same. |
| 05:37 | We just go through each one individually, set it up in the software, and then it's really important to test and make sure that the numbers we're seeing on the screen are accurate. |
| 05:47 | Once we've gone through all of the input testing, we want to basically do the same with the outputs. |
| 05:53 | We can see if we open our ECU settings and type in aux, we can see all of the different auxiliary outputs that are set up here. |
| 06:03 | So we have auxiliary three is a tacho. |
| 06:05 | We've got some E throttle controls here, and we've got a general purpose output, which we're using to control the check engine light. |
| 06:13 | So the general purpose output for the check engine light here is triggered on condition one or two. |
| 06:22 | Condition one is a warning when the engine temperature goes over 102 degrees. |
| 06:27 | There's another one set up here for an auxiliary virtual channel, which when that's on it'll bring the check engine light on, and if we check out that virtual auxiliary one output, we can see that it is set up as an check engine light. |
| 06:43 | So that'll make the check engine light function in the normal way. |
| 06:46 | Basically when you turn the car on, the check engine light will come on. |
| 06:49 | It'll go off if there's no faults, and if any other faults come up, it'll bring on the check engine light. |
| 06:55 | Okay, we also have some other setups in here and one of them is an output for the fuel pump relay. |
| 07:01 | We can see that that is set up on ignition drive five. |
| 07:06 | So basically any of the unused ignition or injector drives can be set up as an auxiliary output. |
| 07:12 | Now one way we can test this and make sure that it's functioning correctly is by tuning it to the on mode. |
| 07:19 | We double-click on it. |
| 07:20 | We choose test on. |
| 07:21 | Now when we do this we want to be listening because you'll hear both the fuel pump relay click and you'll also be able to hear the fuel pump actually turn on and start flowing fuel. |
| 07:32 | So if we do that, and we can hear the fuel pump start running, that confirms the output's working. |
| 07:39 | If we had a fuel pressure sensor or a fuel pressure gauge hooked up, obviously we'd see fuel pressure at the same time. |
| 07:45 | So once you've finished testing it, it's really important to turn it back to the correct function. |
| 07:50 | And again, with any of the auxiliary outputs we've got set up, we'd just do the same. |
| 07:54 | Go through and configure them and test that they're working. |
| 07:59 | Now when you're testing solenoids such as variable cam timing solenoids or perhaps idle speed solenoids, It can be beneficial to use the pulse width modulated output which we looked at in the course. |
| 08:12 | Now the reason we can do that is when we're pulse width modulating the output, it'll click the particular output, relay, solenoid, whatever we're testing on and off at a relatively low frequency, and we'll be able to hear that output in the engine by it actually clicking on and off as we test it. |
| 08:30 | It makes it really easy to audibly hear that the output is functioning and if we're testing motor port outputs in the engine bay, we can go through and unplug them one by one until we find out which output was working. |
| 08:42 | It makes it easy to test and confirm that we've got the right output wired up to the right channel on the ECU. |
| 08:50 | So that basically completes our input and output testing. |
| 08:53 | If we've gone through all of those procedures for every input and output on the ECU, we know we're not going to get into trouble further down the track when we find that something isn't working and we don't know why. |
| 09:05 | Once we've gone through the input and output testing, the next step is to set up both the fuel and ignition side of the ECU so that the ECU knows how to control the injectors as well as the ignition system. |
| 09:17 | So we're going to go through that now, and we're going to start with the fuel system. |
| 09:22 | Now the place we'd start here is in the fuel main menu. |
| 09:27 | You can see we've got some options here. |
| 09:29 | The first one is our injection mode. |
| 09:31 | It's set to sequential, which is how we want to leave it. |
| 09:34 | If we double-click on this though, we see the options that are available. |
| 09:38 | The correct option there is going to depend on the particular engine you're running and how the injectors are wired up. |
| 09:44 | Next we've got our fuel equation. |
| 09:47 | Now this is specific to the G4 Plus, but a lot of ECUs that use a millisecond-based fuel table have a similar function. |
| 09:55 | Now this is a background function that goes on to adjust the fuel output based on changes in manifold pressure. |
| 10:02 | Now from the EFI Fundamentals course we remember that the ideal gas law shows that air density doubles as air pressure doubles, . |
| 10:12 | and basically to account for that and keep the fueling stable, when we double our air pressure, we also want to double the injector pulse width output. |
| 10:22 | So this loaded course map fuel equation does this in the background so we get a flatter fuel table, basically the ECU is doing some of the work for us. |
| 10:33 | The next thing we've got to look at here is our master fuel pulse width number. |
| 10:38 | Now this is used to calibrate the resolution of the fuel tables so this number is dependent on the size of the injector you've got in the engine, also the capacity of the engine, its volumetric efficiency, and also how much power we expect it to make. |
| 10:55 | It sounds like a lot to take in, but the reality is it's not that important because we can change this number later on if we decide we need to change the scaling of the fuel table. |
| 11:05 | If we just pop back to the fuel table I'll just show you what I mean here. |
| 11:09 | You can see we've got numbers that span between 21 and the maximum we've got up here is around about 58. |
| 11:16 | Okay I like to have those numbers reach a maximum of around about 60 to 80, and the reason we do that is because it gives us good resolution and that means when we make a change to the fuel table number, we can make quite a fine change and that lets us really dial in the tune correctly. |
| 11:35 | So we would use that fuel pulse width number to allow us to achieve that. |
| 11:41 | If we don't know where we're starting, I would suggest starting with a number somewhere around about 12 milliseconds, and we can adjust that quickly later on once we've got the engine up and running. |
| 11:51 | So we'll just change that to 12 for the moment. |
| 11:53 | We've also got a master fuel trim, which we don't need to worry about, and here we've got our stoichiometric air/fuel ratio, which if we are tuning on pump fuel, we want to leave at 14.7 to one. |
| 12:06 | One other feature the G4 Plus gives us is this open-loop lambda table. |
| 12:11 | Now what this does is a background compensation based on our target AFR table, which is here. |
| 12:19 | So we can make changes to our desired air/fuel ratio in this target AFR table and the ECU will manipulate the injector pulse width output to make those changes for us. |
| 12:33 | So it's an open-loop table. |
| 12:34 | There's no feedback needed for this. |
| 12:36 | The ECU isn't actively trying to achieve this target. |
| 12:40 | We still need to manually tune for the number we're achieving, but this will help keep the fuel table flatter. |
| 12:49 | Next we want to check the injector dead time table. |
| 12:52 | So if we type in injector dead time here, this brings up the injector dead time table. |
| 12:57 | Now to fill this out correctly, we are going to need injector dead time data for the particular injectors you are running. |
| 13:05 | So this is the table where you enter that information. |
| 13:08 | Once we've got the injectors all set up, the next step is to test the outputs, and the G4 Plus has a nice handy injector test mode. |
| 13:19 | Now what we can do in this test mode is we can choose each of the injectors individually, and the ECU will pulse them. |
| 13:27 | Now that lets us audibly hear that the injector is running. |
| 13:32 | Again, if we open the bonnet we can hear in the engine bay if the injector is clicking, it is probably pulsing on and off, and we can also highlight which injector is running by unplugging it. |
| 13:41 | So this lets us check that the injectors are wired to the correct channel on the ECU. |
| 13:45 | One important point here is to make sure when you're doing this injector test your fuel pump is not running, otherwise you can end up filling the engine with fuel. |
| 13:54 | You can either turn the fuel pump output off on the ECU temporarily, or unplug the relay, or disconnect the fuel pump manually. |
| 14:02 | Once we've done the injector side of things it's time to move on to the ignition, and it's basically a repeat. |
| 14:08 | So if we go to the ignition main menu, you'll see all of the parameters that are available for that. |
| 14:15 | Our ignition mode is one of our main features here. |
| 14:18 | If we click on that we can see all of the options. |
| 14:21 | Again, this is already set up for us because it's a plug and play ECU. |
| 14:25 | We have coil on plug on this Altezza 3SGE engine, so we want to choose direct spark where each coil is controlled individually. |
| 14:34 | Next is our spark edge, which depends on the output the ECU is going to, I'm sorry, configures the output the ECU will send to the coils. |
| 14:45 | For most ignition systems this is going to be falling, but as we said in the course, there are some exceptions. |
| 14:51 | If you are unsure, make sure you check with your ECU manufacturer, as if you get this wrong, it will damage the coils. |
| 14:58 | There are some other parameters in here that we don't really need to worry about, including the way the dwell table is set up. |
| 15:05 | In this case we're choosing milliseconds. |
| 15:07 | We've got spark duration, which is the minimum amount of time the spark is allowed to occur for. |
| 15:13 | We can also set in here a maximum advance, so this is handy if you've got a lot of compensations going on and adding up. |
| 15:21 | No matter what those compensations are doing, this will clamp the maximum ignition advance the ECU can provide to 45 degrees in this case. |
| 15:30 | So again, once we've got the ignition side of things set up, we want to go through and test the outputs and make sure we're actually getting spark, and again, we can do this with the ignition test. |
| 15:41 | It's basically the same as the injector test. |
| 15:44 | So we can choose each channel and we can turn the channel on and we'll find that the coil that we're testing will create a spark. |
| 15:54 | Now there's a couple of ways of testing that. |
| 15:56 | The easiest way is generally if you listen carefully, you'll actually hear the coil is producing a spark. |
| 16:03 | You'll hear a slight tick. |
| 16:05 | If you want to go one step further, you can physically remove the coil from the engine, put a spark plug in it, which you earth out on the engine block or rocker cover and you'll visually see that the coil is producing spark. |
| 16:18 | The last part of this test is to make sure, again just like the injectors, that the coils are wired to the correct channel on the ECU. |
| 16:25 | So once we've done that, we've got our ignition and our fuel system set up, and we know that basically everything is going to work correctly on that front and we can move on. |
