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Road Tuning: Step 2 - Trigger Setup

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Step 2 - Trigger Setup

04.44

00:00 Now that we've got the fuel and ignition side configured and set up and tested, we want to make sure that the ECU actually knows what's happening from the trigger signals it's receiving.
00:11 These are the most important signals that the ECU gets.
00:14 These signals tell the ECU how fast the engine's turning and generally with most engines will also have an input telling it whereabouts in the engine cycle it is.
00:25 All of the outputs based on fuel and ignition are based off these two signals so if we don't have this right then nothing is going to work correctly.
00:36 If we go through into the trigger menu, the trigger setup, we can see we've got trigger mode.
00:43 In this case we've got a mode specifically for the Toyota 3SGE VVTi engine.
00:49 If we cycle through here you can see that Link with their G4 Plus offer us a whole lot of different setups which are already preconfigured for a lot of the popular engines that these ECUs have been installed in.
01:03 Obviously we still want to leave that set to Toyota 3SGE.
01:07 Now what this does is it preconfigures the ECU to expect a certain trigger pattern which has been decoded by Link by their engineers and that already sets everything up.
01:18 We don't really have a lot of work to do.
01:21 If we go through and look at Trigger One and Trigger Two though, we can see how those have been set up.
01:27 Trigger One here is configured as a reluctor-type trigger and you can see here we've got the filtering which we talked about in the course, is set to low.
01:37 We've also got the arming threshold table which again we talked about in the course which is our arming voltage or threshold for the reluctor pick-up.
01:46 You can see as we discussed, we've got a low voltage at low rpm increasing up to, in this case, actually 6.5 volts which is quite high for reluctor pick-up.
01:56 Again because this is plug and play, we shouldn't really need to adjust these, but it's handy to know where they are.
02:02 If we go back one step we can look at the input setup for Trigger Two as well.
02:09 Actually we'll do it through here.
02:11 Trigger Two basically is the same thing.
02:13 We've got again a reluctor pick-up.
02:15 In this instance the filtering is being set to Level Two, and we've got the same arming threshold table.
02:21 This one is set up slightly differently with a slightly lower voltage.
02:26 That's where you would access those and make changes if required.
02:30 What I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn the fuel off so that the engine won't start.
02:37 We're going to crank the engine, and this would be the first step particularly on an ECU that we're not familiar with.
02:46 It's not a plug-and-play ECU like this.
02:49 What we want to do is physically test that the ECU is receiving the correct signals.
02:54 We do that by going to the runtime values menu.
02:57 You can see here we've got our trigger status.
02:59 We've got Trig One signal, Trig Two signal, and ECCS which is specific to Nissan.
03:05 We don't need to worry about that, and our Trig One error counter.
03:08 If I now crank the engine, we should see that both Trig One and Trig Two signals go green.
03:18 We saw that.
03:20 Basically that means that the ECU is receiving a valid signal.
03:23 You can see here we just got a Trig One error counter click up to one.
03:27 There's nothing to worry about.
03:29 Quite often when the engine is first synchronizing, when it first starts cranking, we will see one or maybe two trigger errors.
03:36 What we'd worry about is if we see this continually cycling triggering errors.
03:40 That would suggest we've got a problem that needs to be fixed.
03:43 Another thing I like to look at here as we move across to our engine speed, while we're cranking we should see a realistic speed.
03:51 So we'll do that again, and you can see we're getting a constant speed of around about 200 rpm.
04:01 Generally most engines at crank will be somewhere between about 100 and 300 or 400 rpm.
04:07 If we're seeing really unrealistic numbers in there like maybe 2,000 or 3,000, or the numbers are cycling and erratically changing, again, that would suggest we've got some problems there that need to be fixed.
04:19 We've tested all of that.
04:20 We're getting trigger signals.
04:21 We're getting a realistic rpm.
04:23 That lets me know that we're going to be pretty close to going, and the ECU is going to understand what's going on with our engine.
04:31 One thing to remember there is to go back and turn our injection mode back to sequential so we will have fuel injection when the time comes, and we'll store that change.

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