Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing
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Step 1: ECU Configuration and Testing
13.55
| 00:00 | - The first step of our job is to configure the Haltech Elite ECU so that it knows what engine it's controlling and what inputs and outputs are configured. |
| 00:10 | Now this is more important with the elite ECU simply because it is a universal ECU. |
| 00:17 | In can be configured to run just about any engine. |
| 00:20 | This isn't a plug-and-play solution for the 350-Z. |
| 00:25 | So let's have a look at the ESP software and we'll go through the options we need to consider for the basic configuration. |
| 00:33 | So we'll start by clicking on the 'cog' icon which takes us to our main set-up. |
| 00:38 | And this is neatly laid out covering all of the aspects that we need to deal with. |
| 00:43 | We're going to start with our engine configuration and you can see at the moment we're in the main tab. |
| 00:51 | So in this position here we need to configure some of the basic parameters for our engine including the capacity, the engine type and the number of cylinders. |
| 01:01 | Engine capacity particularly is important because at the moment we're going to be looking at the volumetric efficiency tuning model and in order for that to work correctly it needs to accurately know the engine capacity. |
| 01:15 | So we've got those parameters configured. |
| 01:18 | At the same time, over on the right hand side we have our firing order so this is the firing order of the engine. |
| 01:25 | Again, it's vital that the Haltech knows what order the engine firing order is so that it can correctly control the fuel and spark. |
| 01:35 | Moving on we have the trigger tab which we're going to look at a little bit later on. |
| 01:41 | We'll move to our fuel tab and here we have some parameters related to the fuel control of the engine. |
| 01:48 | A key among these options here is our tuning method which you can see at the moment is set to 'volumetric efficiency'. |
| 01:58 | If we look at the options we can have mass air flow injection time as well. |
| 02:02 | I'm finding that volumetric efficiency is becoming the most popular option. |
| 02:06 | That's what we're going to look at. |
| 02:08 | It also does offer some advantages if you accurately tune the engine using the VE model. |
| 02:14 | If you can come back and make changes to the engine configuration at a later point. |
| 02:19 | Key point with this is the little tick box here that says 'auto VE air temp compensation'. |
| 02:25 | Now, if this tick box is ticked this means that the air temperature compensation will be accounted for in the main fuel equation. |
| 02:34 | And if we've ticked this and we still have an air temp compensation table configured that we can manually tune we would need to have this normally set to 'zero'. |
| 02:45 | From the other hand, if we un-tick this box then we can't have a manual correction table. |
| 02:50 | So that's just an option you can use there. |
| 02:52 | It is important to understand what that means. |
| 02:56 | Next we can choose our fuel type and this simply defines the fuel characteristics including the stoichiometric ratio of the fuel we're running. |
| 03:06 | We're running on petrol so we'll select that. |
| 03:09 | And we have the load axis or what will be used as the load input for our fuel table. |
| 03:15 | We've got some options here but we're going to use manifold absolute pressure. |
| 03:20 | Again, this would be the most common option for most tuning tasks. |
| 03:26 | We now have to define the type of fuel system the engine is running and in this case our options are either constant or map referenced so this will depend. |
| 03:36 | In our case, we're running a returnless system where the fuel pressure is fixed so we'll choose constant. |
| 03:43 | If you're using a vacuum reference to fuel pressure regulator in a return style fuel system we would choose map reference. |
| 03:51 | At the same time we then need to enter our base fuel pressure. |
| 03:55 | So this is important because it makes some calculations or allows the ECU to calculate the differential fuel pressure based on fuel pressure and inlet manifold pressure. |
| 04:07 | So we've entered our measured fuel pressure there of 379 KPA If we want to disable the injection system for testing which we'll look at a little bit later on we can do that by ticking this little box. |
| 04:24 | Now on the right hand side here we also have an option of any particular compensation tables that we would like to use. |
| 04:33 | There's a huge range here and we can do just about anything we want or compensate for just about anything we want depending on how advanced we want our tuning to be. |
| 04:42 | I'm not gonna get into too much detail with these here. |
| 04:46 | Most of the ones we are using at the moment are really related to cranking and cold-start enrichment which will be pretty typical. |
| 04:53 | These would be relatively typical selections. |
| 04:57 | Let's move across and look at our ignition tab. |
| 04:59 | We've got much the same options here. |
| 05:02 | Again, we can choose the load input for our ignition table and we're leaving that at 'manifold absolute pressure' so we use the same axis as the fuel table. |
| 05:11 | We can define our ignition system and this is quite important here because it will depend on the type of ignition system on the engine and we want to make sure we get this right so we don't risk doing damage. |
| 05:25 | In this case, we can choose our ignition mode and we're choosing 'direct fire' because we're running the individual coil on plug effectory ignition system. |
| 05:35 | The trigger edge is very important for the ignition system. |
| 05:39 | In most instances, this will be falling edge but you do need to check there are some instances where this will be 'rising edge' and if you have this incorrectly set you can damage your coils. |
| 05:51 | We also have the ability here to lock our ignition timing which we're going to look at a little bit later on for setting our base ignition timing. |
| 06:00 | We have our dwell mode here as well which we'd normally leave set to 'constant charge'. |
| 06:06 | This is for the dwell time for the coil charging. |
| 06:10 | On the right hand side here similar to the fuel setup we have the ability to configure some compensation tables for our ignition timing. |
| 06:19 | Again, I'm not really going to dwell on this too much. |
| 06:22 | This will depend on what compensations you actually want to include and there's a huge range there. |
| 06:31 | So once we've got the basic or those fundamental engine parameters set up we can move down and we've got our functions tab here which is where we can choose what inputs or outputs will be configured and used on the ECU. |
| 06:46 | At the top we have the currently selected functions that we are using or have already configured. |
| 06:53 | And if we go to the top, we can see what those are. |
| 06:56 | Let's have a look for example at our air temperature sensor. |
| 07:00 | So if we click on 'air temp sensor' all of the set-up relative to that particular sensor is shown so we can choose our connection or whereabouts the sensor is wired to on the ECU. |
| 07:14 | Interesting with the Elite we do have the ability to enable or disable a pull-up resistor so if we're using a temperature sensor to wire a negative temperature coefficient thermistor we do need to enable the pull-out resistor for that to work. |
| 07:32 | Next we can move across to our calibration and this is simply a calibration of intake air temperature versus input voltage. |
| 07:41 | For most of the common sensors we can simply click the open and choose from a relatively extensive list of sensors that are pre-configured by Haltech so it's nice and easy. |
| 07:56 | If we move down, we have our coolant temperature sensor which is relatively similar. |
| 08:02 | In this particular engine we're using a drive by wire throttle configuration and this is relatively involved. |
| 08:08 | We need to configure both a throttle position in fact two throttle positions and two accelerator pedal position sensors so that there is some redundancy in the system. |
| 08:20 | So we need to correctly connect and wire each of those particular sensors. |
| 08:26 | Once we've done that we also have the drive by wire mode of control so this is how the ECU controls the motor. |
| 08:34 | If we click on the calibration button we can then follow through the process of performing the calibration. |
| 08:41 | It's very, very simple. |
| 08:42 | On the Elite, we simply follow the process in order. |
| 08:45 | We start with the accelerator pedal position calibration and then we move onto the TPS calibration and then the job is basically done. |
| 08:55 | You can see at the moment we do have this little warning telling us that something isn't quite right here and that's simply because I've currently got the brake pedal check set to 'disable'. |
| 09:08 | It is recommended by Haltech that you enable this. |
| 09:12 | It requires a brake pedal input to be configured. |
| 09:15 | So the rest of the configuration for our different inputs is relatively straight-forward. |
| 09:21 | If we have a function that we want to add we can choose it from the list the relatively extensive list of additional functions that we can choose to add in. |
| 09:31 | So for example if we wanted to add a gear box oil temperature sensor we would just select this, configure it and add a calibration and then that would be added into the ECU. |
| 09:44 | We can move on from our functions and move down to devices. |
| 09:48 | Now this is where we can select any devices that are connected to the Haltech. |
| 09:52 | The Haltech can communicate via CAN network to several devices. |
| 09:58 | In particular at the moment you can see that we have ticked this little box here for Haltech can support a dash so this is sending a CAN data stream out that can be read by a dash. |
| 10:10 | We also, if we move down we have a CAN based wide-band controller box a WBC2 and if we tick that box that will bring the input from the wide-band controller in so we can use that in our tuning. |
| 10:28 | Now anytime we make a change to this we can see the little warning box comes up telling us that the ECU must be rebooted so any time you do that the ECU needs to be rebooted for those changes to take effect. |
| 10:43 | Now as usual, any time we've made and of these sort of configuration changes we want to make sure that the readings we're getting make sense. |
| 10:53 | So, in particular we want to check out all of the critical inputs so in this case, our manifold absolute pressure sensor. |
| 11:01 | We're going to be looking at our intake air temperature and our coolant temp sensors and making sure that the readings make sense. |
| 11:10 | So in this case, we have had the engine running so you can see our coolant temp is sitting at 51 degrees centigrade. |
| 11:16 | I'd be worried about that for example if the engine was stone cold and hadn't been started. |
| 11:21 | Our air temp on the other hand you can see sitting at 20 degrees which matches our current ambient temperature. |
| 11:27 | So it's worth just making sure that all of these readings make sense. |
| 11:32 | Likewise, I can make sure that my throttle pedal moves as I move my foot on the throttle so this confirms that the drive-by wide throttle system is working correctly. |
| 11:44 | Now on the right hand side here you can see that we have our input from our two wide-band sensors. |
| 11:50 | At the moment the engine isn't running so they're just measuring ambient air in the exhaust system. |
| 11:55 | And if we click on the devices tab down at the bottom we can see that our two CAN options are Haltech can support a dash and also our wide-band controller are both online so those are both functioning correctly. |
| 12:11 | Okay, the other thing we need to configure in our basic configuration here is some information regarding our fuel injectors. |
| 12:20 | And if we come down into our injection system selection tab and click on 'stage one' we have some information about our injectors. |
| 12:30 | The important parts here are first of all our injector dead time table. |
| 12:35 | So this information here is a three dimensional table relative to differential fuel pressure and battery voltage. |
| 12:43 | This information needs to come from your injector supplier. |
| 12:47 | In this case, we're using injector dynamics. |
| 12:49 | ID1000 injectors and it's a simple case of copying and pasting the data from injector dynamics website into this particular table. |
| 12:59 | Likewise, we also have our flow data. |
| 13:02 | Now again, the ID1000 injectors as with any injector the flow will vary based on differential fuel pressure so we can set the fuel injector flow versus differential fuel pressure in this table so that the ECU accurately knows the amount of fuel that will be delivered as the differential fuel pressure varies. |
| 13:24 | Lastly, we have our current settings which in this case we have a high current injector a saturated drive injector so we select our impedance has being high and our peak and hold options which you can see here, disappear. |
| 13:40 | Okay, that covers our basic set-up of the ECU so this gets the ECU ready to control the inputs and outputs on the ECU. |
| 13:50 | We can now move on with the next step. |
