WinOLS Mastery: Map Identification & Editing: What is WinOLS
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What is WinOLS
07.57
| 00:00 | - Now that we've covered a lot of the necessary background knowledge that you need to understand in order to move through this course, we can talk more about WinOLS and what it is, what it does and just as importantly, what it isn't. |
| 00:12 | In essence, OLS is simply a binary editor that allows the contents of an ECU's memory to be modified. |
| 00:20 | Of course, that's a very broad description and not overly useful for us for the purposes of engine tuning. |
| 00:26 | The real power and usefulness of WinOLS is its ability to find and define maps within the raw ECU data. |
| 00:32 | When we first open a file in OLS, the software will search through the entire file and highlight potential maps automatically based on internal pattern recognition. |
| 00:42 | That might sound useful but the reality is that this functionality alone is of somewhat limited benefit to us. |
| 00:49 | First of all, this is not a 100% guaranteed way of finding all of the maps that we're going to be interested in. |
| 00:55 | OLS will find dozens of maps that we don't need but just as importantly it may also not highlight the specific map or maps that we do need so it's still up to us to work out what's important for the particular ECU that we're working with. |
| 01:09 | The other aspect with OLS is that the potential maps that it does find will just be raw maps that on their own will make very little sense to us. |
| 01:17 | They won't be displayed like a commercial reflashing software package would do with nice labels such as lambda target for example. |
| 01:25 | It's up to us to interpret what the numbers mean, what the map is likely to be and then apply some scaling in order to convert these raw values into useful data that makes sense. |
| 01:35 | As an example of this, let's take a quick look through the software and see what a sample map looks like in a Bosch MED 9.1 ECU fitted to a mach 5 Volkswagen Golf GTI. |
| 01:46 | We'll cover the features of OLS as well as how to navigate through it in detail as we move further through this course but for now we'll just skip straight to the specific map we're going to focus on which is the driver torque request table, often referred to as driver's wish. |
| 02:02 | We can view the map in a 2D form as we can see here and at this stage it's probably not looking like anything overly useful or obvious. |
| 02:10 | Pattern recognition becomes a very important part of using OLS though and later in the course, you'll learn to recognise the common patterns that we can see in this 2D view and this will allow us to understand that we're looking at a particular map. |
| 02:24 | By double clicking on this map, we can view it as a table of numbers and at this point it looks like something that we can understand and use to make tuning changes. |
| 02:33 | We have a 3D table which is 16 x 12 in size. |
| 02:37 | We also have the option of viewing the table graphically if you prefer. |
| 02:41 | I find this useful for spotting trends or even errors in a table as they become a lot more obvious than simply looking at a table of numbers. |
| 02:49 | Let's swap back to a numerical view though and dive in a little deeper. |
| 02:53 | The Y axis in this table is engine speed and the X axis is accelerator pedal position. |
| 02:59 | The Z axis or map data defines the torque output being requested. |
| 03:04 | In this instance, the data is relative torque as opposed to a specific torque value in newton metres or pound foot. |
| 03:11 | So far so good, however, if we remove the scaling factor from the table, we're now looking at the raw data that we'd be faced with when we first start working with this ECU. |
| 03:22 | For example, our X axis which you'll recall is accelerator position, now spans zero through to 65,535 instead of the typical zero to 100% we'd expect. |
| 03:32 | Engine RPM is 1600 through to 24,000 and the requested torque value spans zero through to 32, 768. |
| 03:42 | So you can see there's a few steps involved in getting from these raw values through to something that we can understand and threfore modify. |
| 03:49 | At this point you're probably wondering how on earth you could be expected to work out what these raw values or numbers mean and how you could possibly just know that this is in fact a driver's wish table. |
| 04:02 | However that's what this course is for and we'll be covering all of these topics in enough detail that you'll be able to confidently find your own maps. |
| 04:11 | Right now, I just want to show you what WinOLS is and how it works. |
| 04:16 | Once we have a defined map, then OLS works in a very similar way to any tuning software and the numbers within the tables can be manipulated in a variety of ways in order to make the changes required as you'd expect. |
| 04:28 | A nice feature with OLS is that we're always working from a stock or original file and any changes we make will end up being saved as a version of that original file. |
| 04:38 | This means we can always compare our map changes to the original file and see what changes have been made. |
| 04:45 | Let's jump to another map and check this feature out. |
| 04:48 | Here we're looking at the lambda for component protection map from the same MED 9.1 ECU. |
| 04:53 | Looking at this in 2D mode, we can see areas of the data that are green, others that are red and some that are blue. |
| 05:01 | I will note that these colours can be changed to suit your preference but the principles will remain. |
| 05:07 | If we double click on this table, we switch to a numeric view and again the individual cells are colour coded. |
| 05:13 | What these colours mean is that a red value has been increased compared to the original while the blue values have been decreased and green values remain unchanged. |
| 05:22 | We can also display any changes as a percentage of the original value, a difference, or we can show the original value. |
| 05:31 | Again, we'll dive deeper into all of these features as we move through the course so don't worry too much about any of the functions I've just mentioned now. |
| 05:38 | You'll become acquainted with all of them soon enough and they'll feel very natural with a little practice. |
| 05:43 | One of the areas where modern factory engine management systems differ from aftermarket standalones is that for many of the tables we need to alter, we're likely to find that we may have multiple tables that may have similar but subtly different values. |
| 05:57 | WinOLS provides a convenient method of organising these maps into a folder structure which makes it easier to find all of the tables relevant to a specific function in the one place. |
| 06:07 | As I mentioned, OLS will find dozens, if not 100s of potential maps that are of no use to us and in order to avoid confusion, we can also delete maps that we're not interested in, once we've found the relevant maps that we do need. |
| 06:21 | This keeps our map directory nice and clean and helps avoid potential confusion. |
| 06:26 | Once we've made the relevant changes to the file, we can then save it as a version with the appropriate information so that we can reference it at a later point and it's ready to be exported. |
| 06:36 | This is where we move into what WinOLS isn't and in most instances, it doesn't provide a means of reading or writing to the ECU. |
| 06:45 | This needs to be handled by a separate hardware interface and in this regard there are multiple options which we'll cover in the next module. |
| 06:51 | With every rule there is an exception though and if you happen to be using the EVC BDM/BSL hardware, then this does communicate directly with the OLS software, allowing reading and writing to be completed from within WinOLS. |
| 07:07 | This style of hardware is not that common but it is still available and worth discussing for the sake of completeness. |
| 07:13 | Before we move on, let's just have a quick recap. |
| 07:16 | WinOLS is a binary editor and it allows us to modify the contents of our ECU's memory. |
| 07:22 | Finding and defining the maps we need to access to tune the vehicle relies heavily on pattern recognition. |
| 07:28 | While WinOLS will automatically recognise and find maps, often this function is of limited use and one of the key skills that this course will teach you is how to find and define the maps yourself using pattern recognition. |
| 07:42 | It's important to understand that by default the maps won't be displayed using numbers that would make sense to us for tuning and we'll also need to apply scaling to the maps in order for them to make sense and be of use to us. |
