Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 5 : Initial Startup ( Laptop )

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Step 5 : Initial Startup ( Laptop )

09.24

00:00	We're finally at the point in our process where we can start the engine for the first time and I know that a lot of tuners get a little bit scared about this, thinking that if they don't have their fuel and ignition absolutely perfected, then the engine's going to end up damaged.
00:12	The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.
00:15	First of all we've already dialled in our base ignition timing, regardless of whether we're using the hyperspark or we're checking the base timing with a factory distributor so we know that our timing should be in the ballpark or at least good enough to have the engine start and idle.
00:29	Likewise, the Sniper calibration wizard has created a calibration suited to our engine, or at least loosely, so again that should be in the ballpark.
00:40	The reality as well is that particularly at idle it really is impossible to damage the engine just with our tuning alone.
00:48	If the engine is tuned way way too rich with too much fuel being injected, simply put, the only real risk to us there is that we end up fouling the spark plugs and conversely if we're too lean, we're just going to probably struggle to get the engine to fire up and idle in the first place.
01:03	The other part of this is that during this step we're not really looking for fine tuning, we're going to make some coarse across the board adjustments if our fuelling isn't correct and of course we've got our closed loop control in the mix as well to help speed up that process.
01:18	Now, the way we're going to deal with this is primarily on the laptop and later on we will have a brief look at the hand control or the LCD screen.
01:27	A lot less to do on the LCD screen and a lot less control parameters so this part is relatively straightforward if you are using the LCD touchscreen and you're relying on the self tuning process.
01:39	Enough talking though, let's get into our tuning software and we'll have a look at a few of the aspects we need to deal with here.
01:46	So, at the moment we're looking at our volumetric efficiency table and from the body of the course or the other worked examples we know that what we essentially recommend is that we start by highlighting an area of the map that corresponds to where the engine's going to be operating when we first start it at idle.
02:01	So, here I've just grabbed from 500 to 1600 RPM and one through to 43 kPa and that's a fair representation of where we would expect the engine to be operating.
02:13	In this case I'm going to do things slightly differently and what we're going to do is actually highlight the entirety of this fuel table.
02:20	Now, the reason that I'm doing this is because we've got a base calibration here as I mentioned that the wizard has created and obviously this isn't going to be perfect, it's simply a starting point but it should have us in the ballpark but not just at idle, also at part throttle, cruise and wide open throttle as well.
02:38	And I'm working on the principle here that if the engine is too rich at idle, let's say maybe we're pulling 10% fuel out, there's a better than average chance that our entire calibration is probably going to be too rich.
02:51	So, we're going to start just by making those across the board changes to the entire table.
02:56	This also avoids us unintentionally bringing in steps in the table if we were only changing that first block out to 1600 RPM that I'd initially highlighted.
03:07	At least we do have a smooth function, we'll get more into that as we get further through the tuning but this is how we're going to deal with it.
03:13	The next obvious question is how do we make tuning changes and for this particular step we'll just focus on the very simple way of making tuning changes.
03:22	While we can directly enter numbers, what we're going to be doing is using the control key and if we press the up arrow key, that adds 1% to the current cell.
03:30	Control and the down arrow will of course remove 1%.
03:33	Now, if we want to make coarser changes, we can hold down the control key and press the right arrow key, that will add 5% and the left arrow key of course will remove 5%.
03:43	There's some other math functions and offsets that we'll talk about once we actually get into the steady state tuning itself but for now that's all we need to know.
03:50	One more parameter that we just want to cover off before we try and get this engine started, we'll come across to our closed loop learning.
03:57	And in the original configuration we did talk about the fact that by default the closed loop learning won't begin until the engine's at 160°F.
04:06	And that's probably not a bad place to be when we've actually got the engine running and tuned but for the startup, I'd like the closed loop to maybe come into effect a little bit earlier so let's just set that to 100°F.
04:18	This is personal preference, we could leave it exactly like this, so depends what you want to do with this.
04:23	If we do this and we don't want it coming in during a cold start, we can always set this back to 160°F or something similar once we've completed our tune.
04:32	We're going to come across to our learn parameters as well here.
04:37	And we've talked about the learn table and how this works, building up basically a map of corrections over time.
04:45	And I think that's quite powerful but we're trying to basically run this worked example in a typical use study of how someone is going to tune a Holley Sniper 2.
04:56	And I think there's two ways here, if we're using the LCD touchscreen, it's fair to say that most likely we're not going to be getting too involved with the tuning, we're going to be allowing that auto tune or self tuning functionality to work.
05:10	If we're going to go to the trouble of using the laptop software, I'm going to assume that most people doing that will be hand tuning or at least be a lot more involved.
05:19	So, I'm going to run this worked example in that manner.
05:22	So, for that reason what I want to do is make sure that at this point I've got that base fuel learn enable tick box unticked.
05:29	This will mean we do have closed loop control, that's going to help us correcting any errors instantaneous with the fuel table but those corrections will not then transfer across to our long term learn table.
05:42	So, how I would typically do this is I'd have this disabled on the dyno which is what we're going to do but then once I've completed my tune on the dyno, I'd probably re enable this with some tighter tolerances as to how much trim I'd be allowing, maybe plus or minus 5 or 10%, something of that nature.
06:00	Then I'd take the car out on the road and basically drive around normally for a couple of weeks and then have a look and see how that learn table has populated.
06:08	It'll give us an indication of how good our tune is, remembering that there are always going to be some variations in the fueling between what we see on the dyno and what we see out in the real world.
06:19	This will also allow us to see if there's any glaring sort of values in that learn table, something that doesn't make sense, maybe most of the learn table's in the 2% range and then we've got one outlier that's 10%, well that would be a little worrying and we'd want to dig in to see why that's the case.
06:36	Remembering once that learn table is populated and we're happy with everything, we can transfer that through to our base table but for now we're leaving that disabled.
06:45	Alright, so now we can head back to our base fuel table and what we want to do as well is have a look at this little sensor panel down the bottom here and we've got a range of these panels, we can just scroll through them and what I want to do is just start with our idle tuning.
06:58	So, what this will do is show us the parameters that are relevant to us at the moment.
07:02	We've got our throttle position, our manifold pressure and our coolant temperature.
07:07	So, we're 80°F at the moment so we are genuinely a cold start situation for today.
07:13	We've also got our idle air control valve position, not relevant to this particular step, we'll be diving into that next.
07:19	And then most importantly here we've got our target air fuel ratio, we've got our measured air fuel ratio and then our CLComp, that's our closed lip compensation.
07:28	Sitting at zero means it's making no compensation changes, negative means it's pulling fuel which means that essentially we have numbers in our VE table that are too large, telling the ECU that we've got more air going into the engine than we really do, hence it's injecting too much fuel.
07:43	And of course vice versa, if the numbers are positive, that means that it's adding fuel because we're lean, meaning the numbers in our VE table are too low.
07:51	Alright, so let's get back to our table and again we'll just highlight the entirety of the table like we did before, remembering how we're going to be making those changes.
07:59	And we can get our engine up and running or at least try for the first time.
08:03	Now, we may need a little bit of throttle to keep the engine running so I'm just going to manipulate the throttle as need be to try and keep the engine running.
08:12	Let's crank it now and see how we get on.
08:17	OK well that actually started literally first pop which is pretty impressive for how simple our setup so far has been.
08:25	Now, if we look, I haven't made any changes at the moment and I'm completely off the throttle.
08:30	We can see that we are in cold start enrichment as well, our target air fuel ratio is 13.0 at the moment and we can see that we're matching that reasonably well but let's have a look, our closed loop compensation's sitting at zero so at the moment we're actually pretty well on the money but let's just make a change here, we are a little bit leaner than that 13.0 target so control and we'll press the up arrow and we'll do that twice and that should get us pretty much right on the money there.
08:57	So, at this stage our base calibration actually looks to be in pretty good shape but of course we still have the engine warming up so we can't take too much notice of this.
09:06	So, at this stage we've got our engine started for the first time, it's doing everything we'd expect and we're ready to move on with the next step of our process.
09:13	Before we get into that next step, we'll also have a quick look at this process for this particular step using that 3.5 inch touchscreen.