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WinOLS Mastery: Map Identification & Editing: Configuring WinOLS

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Configuring WinOLS

25.06

00:00 - In the last module, we showed you how to download the test or demo version of WinOLS and in this module, we're going to dive into a high level view or tour of some of the software functionality so we can start getting to grips a little bit with the software and understand how it works and some of the functions that we have available.
00:18 This particular module is not intended to be an all encompassing tour of the software, rather this will be high level, as we move further through this practical skills section of the course and then as we move into our worked examples you're going to start to build a more thorough understanding.
00:35 For this particular module, I don't want to overwhelm you with all of the functionality but rather just start to get to grips with some of the more common functions and features that you will be using on a day to day basis.
00:49 So let's dive into the software.
00:50 As it's open here, there's really not a lot we can do and in fact, we see that the majority of the toolbar up here is actually greyed out because at the moment we have no project open so let's get started by opening a project.
01:05 There's a couple of ways we can do that.
01:07 If we are going to be starting a new project which we'll look at shortly in an upcoming module, we can use the little new project icon here in the toolbar.
01:17 In this case we will instead be opening an existing project and we can do that with the little open icon here, there's also shortcut keys you can use.
01:27 This will give us a list of all of the files that we have access to or projects that we have access to.
01:33 At the moment for simplicity, we've got one available which is for a mark 5 Volkswagen Golf.
01:39 And if we click OK here, what we're going to find straight away is we actually have two versions available for this file and we've got original and we've got one called HPA Tuned which hopefully should be pretty self explanatory, this really comes back to what we've talked about a number of times in the body of the course where as we start making modifications to our files, these get saved as versions and we can always reference these back to an original version.
02:07 Meaning it's really simple to revert back to an original if for any reason we decided that we need to.
02:14 It's also as you'll see, very easy to then reference any changes that have been made in a tuned file back to the original.
02:21 So we can see for example where we've added or subtracted a lambda target value or a torque request just for a couple of examples.
02:30 In our case here, just so we've got something to look at, what we'll do is we'll choose the HPA Tuned file and we're going to click OK.
02:36 Now this is going to open in a format that is going to be significantly different to when you're opening a fresh binary file where you've made no definition, or you have no map pack.
02:48 Let's just have a quick look around here.
02:51 For a start we have this window in the middle, this is where we're going to be completing a lot of our work, we've got a few ways of viewing this which we'll look at shortly, we can move it around, we can maximise this just like you'd be used to essentially in any Windows software.
03:08 The benefit of being able to shrink this down and move them around really comes into its own when we are comparing two files back to back as well, we can view both of the files together.
03:17 Over on the left hand side here, we've got our menu structure and for a start what we can see here is we've got our hex dump, that is highlighted.
03:28 Then moving down here we've got a folder structure called my maps, this is where we're going to start storing the maps that we've found and we've scaled or defined.
03:39 And just to make things a little bit easier here, what you can see is that we've actually got a folder structure here that has been created.
03:47 The reason for this is that as we've already talked about in the body of the course, there is almost always going to be multiple maps for a lot of the functions we're going to be looking at so for simplicity, it's nice if we can store all of the maps relevant to a particular function in the same place.
04:03 That way we can see them all at the same time, it just makes our workflow a little bit easier and makes everything a little bit cleaner.
04:10 So for example, at the moment we can see that we have our driver requested lambda folder open and we can see that we've got three maps within that particular folder there.
04:22 All the same map but the ECU will decide which of those three to work on, based on a number of other parameters.
04:30 We can of course click to close that down.
04:33 Pretty much navigate this just like any other software that you'd already be familiar with.
04:39 We will be showing you how to create these sub folders and how to assign the maps that you've found and scaled into these folders as we go.
04:49 At the bottom of our folder structure we can see we've got one that is listed as potential maps and in brackets there, 204.
04:57 So when you first open a fresh project or start a fresh project, we've got no map pack.
05:02 Essentially this is all you're going to have.
05:05 You'll have your my maps folder which will be empty because you haven't done anything yet and you'll have these potential maps.
05:11 Let's just click on this to expand it out and we can see as we scroll down here, all of the maps, obviously 204 of them, that WinOLS has highlighted as potential maps.
05:23 And again as we've already discussed in the course, some of these maps are likely to be incorrect or completely irrelevant to our purposes, likewise OLS is also quite likely to have overlooked some of the maps that we actually do need to find and define.
05:38 So this in and of itself is of limited use.
05:42 Now while we are looking at this menu structure on the left hand side, a couple of other things that are worth mentioning here.
05:49 If we hover over the vertical line here, hold down our left mouse button, we can expand this out or close it down a little bit to give ourselves a little bit more screen real estate or to better visualise what's actually written in the text file there on the left hand side.
06:04 If we want to give ourselves all of the screen real estate possible.
06:08 We can also click on this little icon here and what that's going to do is completely remove that panel from the left hand side of our screen.
06:17 And if you do panic about that and don't know how to get it back, well that's nice and easy because we can see we've got a little right arrow icon over here and of course clicking on that will get us back where we started.
06:27 Now looking up the top of our menu structure, I'm not going to again go through everything here but some of the more common parameters that we will be using, up here we've essentially got some zoom functions for our X and our Y axis and we can manipulate these just to give us a better visual representation of what we're actually looking at and so we're going to be using those quite frequently as we go.
06:52 Icon here, which we can click on, that's going to turn on or turn off our grid structure.
07:00 This is quite useful just for getting a reference of the magnitude of the Y value which we will be using from time to time so for the moment, let's just leave that on.
07:09 Moving across to the right, we've got the ability to set OLS up in 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit or floating point depending on the particular map that we are looking at.
07:24 We've also got the ability to set OLS in a high/low or low/high mode.
07:32 And this is a little bit tricky to explain, we'll again see this in action as we go through this but depends on the particular controller we're working with and the particular map we're looking at.
07:44 Sometimes when we're viewing the data it's just going to not make sense and by changing it from low/high to high/low, everything will sort of start to look a little bit more sensible so this is one that we will need to change from time to time.
07:56 Also got the ability to view this as a signed or unsigned data.
08:03 Again sometimes we will find maps that are signed, other times they won't be signed so we will be needing to change between these from time to time.
08:13 Then moving on we've got the ability to show our text view data in binary, decimal or hexadecimal.
08:21 So again just some of this comes down to personal preference as to how we want to view the software.
08:27 Lastly over the right hand side we've got the ability to view our changes so this is important when we're comparing back to our original file.
08:35 At the moment we obviously haven't got anything visible so a little hard to explain that but we'll see in a moment.
08:41 Alright let's dive into this hex dump and see what we're actually dealing with and at the moment we obviously can't see anything within our main window here.
08:50 What we want to do is understand that first of all, on the bottom left hand corner we've got the ability to display the data that we're viewing as 2D, which is what we've got clicked at the moment, text or 3D.
09:04 Particularly when we are starting to look for maps, I'd highly recommend that you use the 2D view which we've got highlighted at the moment.
09:14 This is really important to allow us to visualise the data so that we can start looking at the patterns and using our pattern recognition.
09:23 If we click to data as a text view for example, it's not going to be very easy unless you're an absolute pro, to be able to really take too much away from this.
09:34 Let's go back to 2D for the moment, we'll have a better look at those different options once we've actually got a map up and highlighted.
09:41 Along the bottom axis here we can see basically a visualisation for the entire binary file, where abouts the data is.
09:51 So we can see these coloured regions, like here, there's a few here, and then the actual main data area is this one over here to the right so this is where the actual tune data is contained.
10:05 You can see we've got this little blinking cursor here, this shows where we are so we've just opened this file and we can starting at the very beginning of this binary file but again no real data here, absolutely useless to us.
10:19 So what we're going to do is just hold down on that and we can slide it across and what I want to do here is just get us across to the actual main data area, doesn't really matter where we go at the moment.
10:31 And once we're actually into some data, everything's going to look a little bit more sensible.
10:35 Now there are a variety of ways of manipulating where abouts we're viewing in the data.
10:40 You saw me there just drag that cursor along.
10:43 That's great for making large wholesale changes, getting us from the start right to the end for example, like I've essentially just done there.
10:51 But once we're actually within that tune data area, we're going to want to make smaller changes so here I can hold down the right arrow key and that's going to move us relatively slowly through the file.
11:04 If I just click to the right of where the cursor is, so I'm using the left key there, basically we're going to then scroll through one full screen of data at a time.
11:14 Now looking at the data that we've got at the moment and let's just maximise that screen for a little bit more clarity.
11:21 So we can see again where abouts we are.
11:25 We also will see displayed below this the current cursor locations to the actual address that we're accessing at the cursor point as well so this allows us to be quite specific.
11:36 And if we do know a specific address that we want to go to, let's say that we already have an idea of where a particular map we're interested in is, what we can do is click down on our cursor location and then we can directly enter the address that we want to go to and the cursor will of course jump there.
11:57 In this case I'm not going to do that so we'll cancel out of that box.
12:00 Now at the moment on the screen we have a series of maps that OLS has found and highlighted for us.
12:09 And that is what we can see here at the top.
12:12 So it's highlighted these as 14 x 12 tables and they are 8 bit so again not all of the time will these actually be tables that are relevant or of interest to us, other times they will be but this is how that raw file will look once WinOLS has gone through it and found the potential maps or things that it thinks are going to be maps.
12:38 Seeing as we're now in an area of this binary file that actually contains tuned data, we can get a better sense of what the text, 2D and 3D views actually look like so again, of course at the moment we're on 2D, as I suggested we want to be on 2D when we are actually trying to use our pattern recognition because we see these visual patterns just like we've got here.
13:01 Let's change across to text view though and now we are viewing the map exactly the same, you can see it's still highlighted but now in a text view so we have the address on the left hand side of this and we've also got a kind of a visual representation of the data magnitude here, that is demonstrated across to the right hand side.
13:25 Now looking at this at the moment, we are in a decimal format.
13:30 We can, we know that because we see that the little 255 icon is highlighted here.
13:37 Let's just change that by clicking on the hexadecimal icon so that will now change to hex.
13:43 So each of those pieces of data were originally four values, now they've dropped to two, just our change between hexadecimal which we know, the largest hexadecimal value FF is the equivalent of 255 in decimal.
13:58 Let's change that now across to binary and obviously now we see that everything gets much larger, we're now representing each of those bytes of data as a binary value.
14:09 Now when we are looking at the data like this in a text view, the other thing we can do is manipulate the width of the columns.
14:18 So at the moment we can see the width or number of columns that we have across, let's just actually swap this back to our decimal for the moment and what we can do, we can see down in the bottom right hand corner it's showing us that at the moment we are operating with a width of six.
14:36 So basically six bytes in width and we can manipulate that, if I press the M key, we'll see that that steps up to seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, we can also drop that back down by using the W key.
14:52 Now why that's important is that if we look at this potential map and the little header here says that it is a 14 x 12 map and it's eight bit.
15:01 OK so what does that actually mean? Well it means that the map, if we were looking at a conventional 3D table of values, it is going to be 14 x 12.
15:13 So what we want to do in order to make this look a little bit more sensible is we want to get the width of our table there to match.
15:21 So again coming back down to the bottom right hand corner, at the moment that is a width of 10 so we can click the M key, take that out to 14.
15:29 Now hopefully what you can see as I do this is that our little visual representation here on the right hand side starts to make a little bit more sense.
15:40 We've definitely got a bit of a pattern there but something's not quite right there.
15:44 And the reason it's not quite right is that our starting point for our map is right here.
15:51 And what we actually want to do is move that across so that we're actually starting on the left hand side.
15:58 And what we can do in order to manipulate the way this is displayed, if we hold down the control key and we press our right arrow key, you can see that we're moving that piece of data across to the left there.
16:10 Now what that does is it gives us a nice graphical representation over here on the right hand side of what that table data looks like.
16:19 So this is something that is really important to keep in mind when you are using this text view and finding and defining these files or maps I should say.
16:29 The data at the top here, this is actually axis data and then the Z axis or map data is this main section here.
16:40 Alright let's have a look now at a map that has already been defined.
16:45 So what we can do here is close down our potential maps.
16:48 Let's look at our driver requested lambda and we'll double click there in order to open up our sub folder and we've got three tables here.
17:00 So let's double click on our first one here.
17:02 So looking at this table as it's opened up, we've got a 3D text view table which doesn't probably look dramatically different to what we'd expect with a commercial reflashing software package.
17:13 Maybe not quite as pretty or intuitive but still pretty self explanatory.
17:18 Let's dive into the table in a little bit more detail and the Y axis or vertical axis here, we've got our engine speed.
17:27 The horizontal axis here we've got our relative torque in a percentage form and then of course the numbers inside of the table, the Z axis values there are our lambda targets.
17:38 Now looking at the values in the table we can see that some of them are green and others are blue.
17:44 The specifics of the colours don't really matter because we can set those to our own preferences but essentially anything in this colour configuration that's green is unchanged.
17:54 Remembering that we are comparing back here to our original file so the blue values have been altered from stock.
18:01 So we can get a sense of what those changes are as well using our little icons up in the right hand top corner of our toolbar.
18:09 So for a start if we click on ORG, that will give us the original values for that.
18:15 We can also click on percentage, that will show us the percentage change.
18:19 So in this case all of these changes we have reduced the values there so that's why they're blue, if we'd increased the values then the colour coding would have changed and it would be red.
18:33 We can also demonstrate this as a difference, specifically a numeric difference and we can go back to our original.
18:41 So little bit of flexibility there in terms of how you want to actually display the data.
18:46 Really helpful though when you are comparing to that original file and just getting a sense of the magnitude of those changes.
18:53 Now while we are looking at this data in a text table view like this, let's also quickly have a look at how we can scale or define the values.
19:03 The hard work's been done for us, we've got another upcoming module where we will go into this in a bit of detail.
19:10 But essentially what we can do is choose one of the axes, in this case let's go with our Y axis.
19:14 I've just clicked on that using the left button of my mouse.
19:18 If I double click on that, what it's going to do is bring up the properties box.
19:21 We can actually alter each of the individual elements in this table from this one box or alternatively we can get a little specific.
19:32 So I'll show you how that works.
19:34 For example at the moment because I clicked on the Y axis, that is the axis that has been highlighted here, I could click on the X axis or the map or Z axis data, or alternatively if I want to edit the X axis, close down that box and double click on the X axis, that's exactly what will come up.
19:53 So looking at this, let's just go back to our Y axis, we can see that we can give that a description.
20:00 In this case, pretty self explanatory, engine speed and the units here.
20:04 Not again particularly over the top, pretty easy to work out.
20:09 The important part here is the factor and offset.
20:13 So this is where we're going to be entering our scaling value.
20:16 So we can actually see here, to get to our actual RPM value, what we've actually done is multiplied that raw value, in this case by a factor of 40.
20:27 So if we actually changed that to one, we can see now this is the raw values for that Y axis as we would see them when we just simply open this map before we start adding scaling.
20:40 So this is really the key to using OLS is understanding how to correctly scale.
20:46 Again we're going to dive into that in a lot more detail in an upcoming module.
20:51 Looking at our map data here, again same information here, we give it a name and a description.
21:00 It's also got a unit which of course in this case is lambda.
21:03 Another element here is particularly when we are just getting started with this data, is that it probably won't have any precision.
21:13 So any decimal places in other words, so this would be what we'd be looking at at the moment which in and of itself is pretty useless, it looks like our lambda target is all set to 1.0 but when we start adding data, instead of rounding up to lambda one, we actually see what the true values are.
21:32 Alright let's cancel out of that, that's just again a quick guide to how we go about scaling.
21:38 Let's have a look at this particular table in 3D now and we can, when we go to 3D, 3D view, we can see that it actually comes up here asking us to click to optimise the 3D view parameters, or we can use control and B which we'll do exactly that.
21:57 And now we can see we've got a 3D table here.
22:00 We can also see the before and after or the original plus tuned file.
22:05 So again just giving us a sense of the magnitude of the changes that have been made for this particular file.
22:12 Alright now that we've had a look at our driver requested lambda table, let's just close that down, we can do that by pressing the little X in the top right hand corner, we're back to our visualisation of our entire binary file and again we can see where abouts we are in that file in the bottom right hand corner.
22:30 Again, just by clicking to the right of the cursor, we can move through that data one screen at a time by clicking to the left.
22:40 We're obviously going to go to the left one screen at a time.
22:43 Now as we do this we can also see data areas popping up here, we can see that in this case, we've got some orange data areas here, sorry red data areas and you'll remember when we were looking at the lambda table, the values blue mean that we had reduced the values, the values of red here we have increased so any time there's a change, this is demonstrated visually within our 2D view like this.
23:12 Now it's also worth just having a quick look at the configuration options so let's do that now.
23:18 We can do that by heading to our miscellaneous drop down menu and we want to come down to configuration or the F12 hot key will get us straight there.
23:29 So essentially this is a list of configuration decisions or choices that we can make that will affect how the software works as well as the look and feel.
23:38 You will actually have made a few basic selections when you first installed the demonstration version of OLS.
23:47 None of those are too critical because we can come back here and manipulate them.
23:52 Looking at one of the more common options that people will want to play around with to suit their own preference is the colours.
23:59 So you can see that by default I've selected the industrial standard colour scheme and from our drop down menu here we can go with the WinOLS preference or we can go with a Windows preference, whatever you want or you can go user defined.
24:16 Really it doesn't matter, just go with something that suits your own preferences.
24:21 There are a range of other options through here that you are welcome to get familiar with.
24:29 None of them really should need to strictly be changed and if you do decide that you do want to make a change at a later point, you can always come back to this F12 configuration window and make changes as required.
24:45 Alright let's close that down now.
24:47 At this point, this is about as far as I want to go in this module.
24:51 Again not intended to be a comprehensive guide at this stage, just looking at some of the core elements.
24:58 As we continue to go through this section, you're going to start learning more about the software as we go.

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