Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 2: Trigger Setup
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Step 2: Trigger Setup
06.16
| 00:00 | - Our next step is to configure the trigger inputs to the ECU. |
| 00:04 | This is some of the most critical information that the ECU relies on. |
| 00:08 | The trigger information gives the ECU information about engine RPM or engine speed as well as engine position. |
| 00:15 | And all of the background calculations for both fuel and ignition are based on this information being accurate. |
| 00:22 | Now again with this particular ECU, is is a plug and play ECU so it comes pre configured which makes our job a little bit easier. |
| 00:30 | But for the sake of completeness, we're going to have a look at what we could do to affect those settings now. |
| 00:35 | Pressing the escape key, we can come through to our triggers menu. |
| 00:39 | And I'm going to start on the triggers setup option. |
| 00:43 | Now we can see here we've got our trigger mode set to multi tooth missing. |
| 00:48 | Now if we double click here though we get a drop down menu and we can look at all of the trigger options available. |
| 00:55 | You'll see that for a lot of popular engines there are pre configured trigger options. |
| 01:01 | Now in this case, we are using multi tooth missing, so we'll leave it set to that. |
| 01:05 | Another aspect before we move on is our RPM filtering. |
| 01:09 | Now this is a filter applied, as it says, to the engine speed input. |
| 01:14 | And here we want to use the minimum amount of filtering possible. |
| 01:18 | Now any time we filter a signal it does reduce the information we're getting from that signal so we're going to leave that initially set to the default value of one. |
| 01:29 | If we open our drop down menu we can see the various options available there. |
| 01:33 | OK so now we've got our main setup done, what we want to do is have a look at our trigger one and our trigger two. |
| 01:40 | We'll start with trigger one, we can see our trigger type is a reluctor pickup. |
| 01:44 | Again just like our RPM filter we can see we have a filtering option and just like the RPM filter, we want to start with this as low as possible. |
| 01:53 | Next we have the position where our multi tooth input is coming from, and in this case it's fitted to the crankshaft. |
| 02:00 | We have the tooth count which is 60 and then the number of missing teeth. |
| 02:04 | So in this case, this is referred to as a 60 minus two trigger input. |
| 02:09 | Last we have our arming threshold so this is the arming threshold table versus engine speed. |
| 02:17 | Again this is pre configured and we don't need to touch it at this particular point. |
| 02:23 | Once we've gone through the inputs for our trigger one, we can do exactly the same on trigger two. |
| 02:29 | In this case we can see that trigger two is an optical hall sensor and all of the settings here again are pre configured for this particular engine configuration. |
| 02:41 | An important point here to mention is our synchronisation or sync mode and this defines what the ECU can expect to see. |
| 02:49 | We can have a crank pulse, a cam pulse, or in this case a cam level input. |
| 02:55 | So now with our triggers set up we can actually make sure that everything is working correctly. |
| 03:02 | And before we do this, what we want to do is prevent any chance of the engine starting and there's a couple of ways we can do this. |
| 03:09 | In this case, what I'm going to do is just go into our fuel main, and I'm going to select off for our fuel system. |
| 03:19 | So this basically is going to prevent the injectors from injecting any fuel. |
| 03:24 | Obviously we need to make sure that we reinstate this before we try actually starting the car for the first time, or we're going to have no fuel. |
| 03:33 | Now what we want to do is press R to bring up our run time values display, and we want to select our triggers and limits tab here. |
| 03:43 | And there's a fair bit of information here that we want to take in. |
| 03:46 | In particular we have our engine speed here and this will display the current engine RPM. |
| 03:54 | What we're going to do in a second is crank the engine. |
| 03:56 | What we're looking for here is a sensible cranking RPM, probably anywhere from about 150 through to about 300 RPM would be typical. |
| 04:05 | Directly below this we have our engine speed ROC or rate of change. |
| 04:09 | So this defines the rate of change of RPM or whether it's positive or negative. |
| 04:13 | Now while we're cranking, we will expect to see our engine RPM fluctuating a little bit. |
| 04:20 | Of course this is a parameter that we can take note of though. |
| 04:23 | Under normal steady state conditions or in normal idle speed, we should expect to see this remaining relatively close to zero, we shouldn't see any dramatic changes in our engine RPM. |
| 04:35 | Next if we move across we can see our trigger status and this tells us whether the ECU is getting the information it requires from our trigger inputs. |
| 04:43 | So we have our trig one and trig two signals and we have a trig one error counter as well. |
| 04:49 | The ECCS sync is a parameter that's specific to Nissan trigger systems. |
| 04:57 | So at the moment you can see that this data is saying no and we have zero trigger errors. |
| 05:02 | What we're going to do now is we're going to crank the engine on the starter motor and we want to make sure that we see valid information. |
| 05:09 | So we should see our trig one and trig two signals, both say yes and they'll turn green. |
| 05:15 | We're also going to look at our engine speed as well as our rate of change. |
| 05:18 | So let's do that now and see what we've got. |
| 05:26 | OK so we saw that straight away we got trig one signal came up and went green and then a little bit later once the cam level sensor had been seen by the ECU, our trig two signal turned green also. |
| 05:39 | We were seeing our engine RPM sit at around about 250 RPM and that was actually very very stable and that was shown by our engine speed rate of change. |
| 05:49 | So at this point, we're comfortable that our trigger system is correctly set up, we've got all of the information coming into the ECU to make sure that it should start. |
| 06:00 | We have to now go back and turn our injection mode back to sequential, otherwise obviously we're not going to get the engine running when it does come time to start it. |
| 06:12 | Alright we're now ready to move onto our next step. |
