Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 10 : Confirming the Tune on the Road/Track ( Laptop )

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Step 10 : Confirming the Tune on the Road/Track ( Laptop )

15.29

00:00	Alright, we're off the dyno and out in the real world and before we cover off how we're going to deal with the road tuning part of this worked example, I just wanted to come back a little bit and show you where we actually ended up when we'd finished with our full power ramp run tuning on the dyno.
00:15	You'll recall we were chasing some small errors in the fuelling and I'd said that rather than extending the worked example, I wasn't going to focus on those and I'd also mentioned that I was going to do some smoothing on the fuel table which I actually omitted in that step.
00:29	So, let's start by going into our Holley EFI software and have a look at our fuel table.
00:35	So, this is our completed fuel table now and what we want to do is have a look at this graphically and you'll see that it's now got a nice smooth shape to it, pretty much what we would expect and the way I achieved that is simply by using the smooth function one time.
00:50	So, if we come back to our fuel whip table, we'll see over here on the top right hand corner, we've got our smooth function so again I've already talked about the fact we don't want to overuse this but in some instances it is a good way of just smoothing out the highs and lows and getting everything closer to the ballpark.
01:08	Now, on top of that I did make some changes to our fuelling to get rid of those couple of little areas in our datalog that we'd already looked at so let's have a look at our final datalog here.
01:18	So, this is our ramp run and what we're looking at obviously is exactly what we were looking at in the last section.
01:25	We're looking at the overlay of our purple line which is our measured air fuel ratio with our blue line which is our target.
01:33	You can see that's overlaying really nicely but if we start sort of clicking around here we can see right at the start, our closed lip compensation sits at 2 and then really as I click through this, we're never more than about 1 or at the most 2% away so much closer, that's where we've left off so I just wanted to reiterate that.
01:51	Alright, let's come back into our tuning software and there's a few things we want to change before we start driving this out on the road.
01:58	So, what we want to do here is bring in our configuration settings and we, or system parameters I should say, and what we want to do is come down to our closed loop and learning, click on that.
02:09	So, at the moment we have our closed loop enabled and we've got our minimum temperature at 100°F.
02:15	Really again what you want to do with this is up to you.
02:18	So, personally with the closed loop control I don't necessarily see this as being a problem, having it run in closed loop during cold start performance.
02:26	Personal preference again, what we do want to do though is make some changes to our closed loop compensation limits.
02:31	We started out with a default plus or minus 100% which is understandably huge and I definitely don't want that level of authority from the closed loop system so what I'm going to do here is come down to the 79-105 kPa range which is our high load wide open throttle and in that area what I want to do is give the system plus or minus 5% authority.
02:56	That obviously also extends out into the boosted areas which we are not going to be getting anywhere near.
03:02	In the rest of the map here what I'm going to do is highlight everything for the moment and we'll give plus or minus 10% authority under cruise conditions but I'm just going to come back here and also increase this to plus or minus 20% in the idle area.
03:16	Generally, we might find that the idle area is more affected by heat soak so sometimes a little bit more authority in that region can be helpful.
03:23	So, again just like a lot of what we've done, this is personal preference and you can do with this as you see fit.
03:30	My theory with this here is that if we've got our tuning pretty much on point, under wide open throttle where the engine's under the highest load, we should need much less than plus or minus 5% trim and if we're outside of that range, it's going to really indicate something else is wrong.
03:44	But as I've just mentioned, idle and light throttle cruise, this can be more influenced by heat soak so a little bit of additional control can be beneficial.
03:52	Alright, next we're going to come over to our learn parameters and we know that we've had this disabled so far.
03:59	What I'm going to do is I'm going to enable it for the purposes of our road tuning and just give it the ability to make these changes rather than us making them manually.
04:09	Again, plus or minus 100% is too much authority for my needs so we're going to basically give this at the moment plus or minus 10%.
04:18	We could do exactly what I've just done prior but my intention here for our particular application is we're going to do some road tuning, basically allow that learn table to populate and then once we've applied that to the base fuel table, I'm actually going to disable the learn table.
04:35	Again, personal preference, some people will choose to leave this enabled all of the time but essentially once I've got my base calibration dialled in really nicely, we will see some potential variation day to day depending on atmospheric conditions and as components potentially wear but we do have our closed loop control giving a short term future and that's really, in my opinion, what we want to use that system for.
04:58	But again personal preference there.
05:01	Alright, we've got everything set up now so let's actually go and have a look at the learn table and see how that's populating.
05:07	And straight away what we can see, which is pretty good, we're sort of sitting in the region of minus two, minus 3% and if we go through in our little panel down the bottom here, have a look at our fuel tuning, we can come through to our learn tuning and that will show the current learn as well as the current closed loop compensation.
05:26	And obviously we're sitting here a bit heat soaked as well so this is why this is always going to be moving around, particularly our idle as I discussed.
05:32	So, what we're going to do is now go for a drive and while I'm driving the car, what I want to do is be nice and smooth on the throttle, we want to avoid sharp throttle inputs that could affect our learning or take us out of closed loop mode.
05:47	I'm noting how smooth or otherwise the engine is operating, we're looking for anything that indicates a little bit of roughness, that would be an area that I'd want to investigate.
05:57	So, that's where we're going to go and we'll also just generally try and get through as much of the cruise area of the load and rev range as we can.
06:04	So, basically driving the car as it's going to be driven on the road.
06:08	We'll also datalog this while we're going so let's get our datalog running and that way we can sort of have a little bit of a closer look into things once we get back.
06:17	Alright, so let's go for a drive now and we'll see how our learning works out in the real world.
06:23	Now, it is important as well with any time we've been stationary like we just have, to give the vehicle a bit of a chance to dissipate any heat soak before we actually start making any tuning changes.
06:36	In our instance here, I'm not making tuning changes while we're driving so this is less important but even the datalog that I just started, we may want to drive the car for two or three minutes before we actually start the datalog and that's going to avoid us having our results influenced by heat soak.
06:52	And what I'm going to do while I'm driving here, as I mentioned, nice and smooth on the throttle but I'm also using a combination of left foot braking and throttle application to try and basically access as much of that map as I can.
07:05	So, now we'll just go for a drive for a few minutes and try and fill in some of that learning table.
07:25	Alright, that's enough data for the moment so we'll pull over and have a look at our results.
07:31	Alright, so I've just stopped our datalog but first of all what we want to do is have a look at the learn table and see how that's progressing.
07:38	And it's looking pretty good.
07:40	Basically, for the majority of this we've got numbers of sort of zero to maybe 3% so in the range of what we would accept.
07:49	You can see straight away the range that I've actually managed to access here but this is representative of normal cruise driving so we've gone up to about 2750 RPM.
07:59	What we may find as well as we drive this more, particularly down in the lighter load areas that we couldn't access on the dyno, that's the area we would expect to potentially see some larger errors but in this case what we've got here is looking pretty good.
08:13	We do have some 4s and 5% trims in the idle area but again we're dealing with potential for starting from a heat soak position there so I'm not overly worried about that.
08:24	Now, let's have a quick look at our datalog and see what we can learn from that.
08:26	Alright, so looking at our datalog, what I've done is I've brought in our green trace here for our throttle position so we can see what's happening there and I've also now brought in our current learn value which we can see down here.
08:39	Now, by default this is spanned minus 999 to plus 999 which means that if we look at the line it actually just looks like it's absolutely straight, we can't really see much detail in there so we can address that by maybe giving a more sensible range so let's enter minus 10, trying to try that again, minus 10 and positive 10 and now we're going to see a little bit more movement in our closed loop learn or our learn value I should say.
09:08	Alright, so down the bottom, the green trace, you can see what we're doing on the throttle and how important it is again just to try and be nice and smooth on that throttle.
09:16	We've got our red trace here, this is our engine RPM and then we've got our closed loop in yellow which we've always had and of course our learn value in red as well.
09:28	So, what we can see, first of all the most important part is that our fuelling is nicely tracking our target pretty well at all times.
09:36	So, we can see at this point here, we're targeting 13.5 and we've got 13.6, again it's moving around a little bit, up in the cruise area here where we're targeting 14.7 and we're pretty much there or thereabouts.
09:47	Our closed loop trim sitting at this point, minus 1%, obviously moves around a little bit but pretty close to our target and then our current learn, minus 2%.
09:57	So, at this stage everything here's looking pretty good, I'm quite happy with everything.
10:02	We can transfer that learn table value onto our fuel table when we're finished so we'll show you that once we're done but as far as our cruise goes, I don't see the need to make any changes to this, we're going to allow the learn table to do that for us.
10:15	What we want to do now is another little test drive.
10:19	Again, we're going to drive around a little bit to get rid of our heat soak and then we'll try a full power acceleration run in second gear and we'll log that as well and see how that works out, see how our fuelling is and see what that does to our learn table.
10:33	So, let's get up and running again.
10:34	Alright, we've got our data logger running now, I'm just going to pull the vehicle down into second gear and we want to start from relatively low in the RPM range and we're just going to accelerate through, hopefully to around about 5500 RPM.
10:48	Alright, we've got rid of our heat soak, we're sitting at about 1700 RPM at the moment, we'll just get round this corner and we'll get our full power ramp run or acceleration run underway.
11:17	Alright, let's pull over and we'll have a look at our results again.
11:20	Alright, now we've got our full power run out of the way, we've stopped on the side of the road, let's have a quick look, first of all at our learn table and so we can see that we got out all the way to about 5750 RPM, although it does tune a little bit ahead so we might not quite have got there but the important part to note is all of these wide open throttle learn table values there are sitting basically plus or minus about 1% so obviously right exactly where we want them to be.
11:48	Now, of course that was one single ramp run, we'd do a few more, we might find that we need to fill this in a little bit more and get some slightly different values but that's a really good place to start.
11:57	Let's also have a quick look at the datalog that we just captured of that.
12:02	And we can see, if we click here, start of our run, 2100 RPM, that's over here on the left hand side of course and right at the very end of the run, 5500 RPM so pretty much did exactly what I was hoping to.
12:15	First of all, we can see our air fuel ratio and our target are all sitting really nicely, one on top of the other so that's all looking pretty good.
12:24	Little bit of error right at the start which is most likely a result of tip and acceleration enrichment although to be fair, I have actually noticed that the accel enrichment on this is excellent without making any adjustments to the settings so far so I'm actually pretty happy with that.
12:39	And then what we're looking for here once we've recovered from this little spike here, looking at our closed loop and see initially we've got a minus 2 but as I click through here, zero, greatest there, positive two, basically we're sitting within mostly plus or minus one, a couple of 2% outliers.
12:56	So, on the basis of this, I'm not going to make any changes, it's looking really really good and I'm really happy with that.
13:03	We've also got our learn table that's going to continue to populate.
13:07	So, while I'm keeping this short and sweet, essentially I would probably spend a week or two driving around in this car with that learn table enabled to really fill in as much of that table as we can.
13:19	Let's head back across to the tuning software and obviously we haven't filled in all this table, we've got these big holes here obviously in the light load high RPM region and we've already discussed this through the worked example, this is close to irrelevant because the vehicle is simply not going to be driven here.
13:38	However, before we transfer these values through to our fuel table, what we could do for the sake of completeness is basically come in here and sort of average what we're seeing.
13:48	So, in this region here for example, we're seeing basically around about minus 1 % so I could basically extrapolate that out in this region here, I don't even think I'd make a change but 0.3 negative and particularly if we're starting to see some bigger values down here, so we can see we've got sort of 2% and 3% in that region that I was talking about so what we might want to do with this is actually extrapolate that all the way down.
14:15	And it's going to probably be closer than if we'd done nothing.
14:19	The rest of it's all looking really really good here so I'm not going to make any changes.
14:23	What we can do here, and it is important to note that you do need to be offline with the ECU.
14:29	When we're offline, we see that the transfer learning to base is no longer greyed out.
14:34	So, we can click that and what that's going to do is transfer our learned values across to the base and it will zero out our learned table again.
14:42	So, if we come through to our fuel table and probably view this graphically, we might start seeing some inconsistencies in the shape creep in.
14:52	I've got a little bit in here but nothing that I'm necessarily going to worry about.
14:55	As I've mentioned we've only done one iteration of this relatively short drive, leaving that learned table to populate and traditionally I would let that go for much much longer.
15:06	But this is the process, you can do this iteratively until you're happy and at the point that I'm comfortable with that, as I mentioned, I would disable that learned table but you may choose to leave that enabled for your own use.
15:18	So, that brings us to the end of the laptop side of our Holley worked example.
15:23	We'll now repeat this process using the touchscreen.