Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 2: Trigger Setup

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Step 2: Trigger Setup

08.37

00:00	The next step of our process is arguably one of the most critical which is setting up our trigger inputs to the ECU.
00:06	And these inputs give the ECU information around engine speed and engine position.
00:10	And this is the most critical information the ECU requires because all of the calculations on fuel delivery and ignition timing are based on this data.
00:19	So, if it's not correct, you're essentially going to find it impossible to even get the engine running.
00:25	If you can, tunability of the engine is almost certainly going to be impossible.
00:29	Now, in most modern engines we're going to have two trigger inputs.
00:33	One that will give engine speed information, most often derived directly from the crankshaft.
00:40	And another one that will give engine position or in other words whereabouts in the engine cycle the engine is.
00:46	And this needs to be derived from the camshaft.
00:49	The reason for this is that there are 720 degrees or two full rotations of the crankshaft to one engine cycle.
00:56	But because the camshafts rotate at half engine speed, we can take data from a camshaft in order to derive whereabouts we are in the engine cycle.
01:06	And this is critical information if we want to run full sequential injection and direct fire ignition.
01:13	So, in our case we've got both pieces of data, so let's start by seeing how we can select this in the G5 ECU.
01:21	And we want to start in our dropdown menu by heading across of course to our triggers menu.
01:27	We'll open that up and start with our trigger setup.
01:30	The first place to start is our trigger mode and we can see that's already set to Mitsubishi Evo 7 -9, a predefined OEM trigger mode.
01:39	If we double click though, we can see that there is a pretty extensive list for both generic as well, as OE specific trigger modes.
01:48	And if you are running something unique or you've put together your own trigger system, you may need to discuss with Link which mode is correct for you.
01:57	But in our case of course the Factory Evo 7-9 mode is what we want.
02:02	We've also got our RPM filtering, just like the filtering I spoke of about the map sensor, we always want to use as little as possible.
02:10	Level one to four and of course one here is the default which is where we will leave it.
02:14	So, that's our overall trigger setup.
02:17	Basically, this has now set the ECU up to understand what it should be seeing and how to decode it.
02:24	Let's press escape and we'll come back to our trigger one and click on that.
02:28	So, trigger one in Link speak is the engine speed input.
02:32	We start with the type of sensor this is and in this case it's an optical slash hall sensor.
02:38	So, basically the ECU is now expecting a square wave digital signal into it.
02:44	We also have the ability to enable or disable the pull up on trigger one.
02:49	So, in our case we want that pull up to be on which would be normal for a digital style input.
02:54	If we double click here we can see we can also select reluctor.
02:58	So, a reluctor or magnetic sensor is the other common input for trigger information.
03:04	This is a two wire sensor that is not powered and it produces a voltage signal as a ferrous tooth comes past it.
03:13	So, just need to select this based on the type of trigger setup that you are running.
03:19	Again we're optical slash hall, we need to have our pull up on, so we're good to go there.
03:26	We also have our trigger one edge.
03:28	Now, this will normally be either rising or falling.
03:32	This is really important if we are running a reluctor sensor because it's possible to have the polarity of that sensor in one of two ways.
03:40	And if we have the polarity incorrect based on our rising or falling edge, then we're going to end up with problems with our timing drifting as the RPM changes.
03:52	I won't get too far into this in this worked example because it's clearly not relevant to our Mitsubishi trigger system.
03:59	But if you are running a reluctor setup then you can find more information in our members webinars.
04:05	Now, in our case we are choosing all because the Evo crank trigger wheel only actually has essentially four edges on it.
04:14	So, for good resolution we want to trigger off all of them.
04:17	So, we'll click OK.
04:18	Alright, now we can press escape, head back to our menu and we'll come across to trig two.
04:23	Our settings in this case, exactly the same.
04:25	Optical hall, our trig two pull up needs to be turned on and again we are triggering off all edges.
04:31	So, our setup there is complete.
04:35	Now, I'm just going to show you how we can go ahead and test, make sure that we are actually getting the right information into the ECU and that's with our trigger scope.
04:44	Before we do that though, we'll just press escape and we want to come up to our fuel menu and our fuel main.
04:50	And we want to come up to our injection mode and momentarily we're going to just switch this off so, that the engine won't try and start.
04:57	I'll just press F4 to store that change.
05:00	Really should go without saying, but important, if you do this to make sure that when you're finished, you re enable sequential injection because otherwise it can be really frustrating if you've forgotten that you've turned the fuel off as to why your engine won't start.
05:13	Now, what we're going to do is head up to our ECU controls menu, we'll click on that, we'll come down to trigger scope which we'll find here at the bottom.
05:21	Now, all this is essentially is a built in oscilloscope that will show us the voltage signal being displayed on trigger one and trigger two relative to time.
05:30	And we can click this little capture button once we are cranking the engine.
05:34	So, I'll crank the engine for a few seconds, click capture and we'll have a look at that trace.
05:43	Alright, so we've got our capture there and we can see first of all green is trig one, we do have data on that as well as blue, trig two, we can see the voltage range that we're seeing here on both of those.
05:54	We can manipulate this essentially like any datalog, so we can kind of see the alignment of the two trigger inputs which can be very helpful in finding problems with triggering issues where the edges may be basically overlapping.
06:11	So, at the moment we know we've got data here, we can also save this and send it to link if we are having trigger problems.
06:18	And again not going too deep into this, with reluctor trigger inputs we can use the trigger scope to help us set the arming threshold table which is peculiar to a reluctor sensor.
06:29	For now we'll close that down and we're going to now look at our runtime values display which gives us a huge amount of information about all of the IO to the ECU, we can get to that by pressing the R key or the F12 key.
06:42	And we'll just drag this up here, we can see across the top we've got a range of different tabs.
06:48	At the moment I am already on our trigger slash limits tab.
06:52	And what we're going to be doing is first of all focusing on our trigger status.
06:56	We can see at the moment we've got trig 1 signal says no, trig 2 signal says no, and we have a trig 1 error counter saying 1.
07:04	We're not running the engine at the moment, it's not cranking, so this is fine.
07:07	Once I start cranking it we should see both trig 1 signal and trig 2 signal turn green and say yes.
07:12	And our trig 1 counter may initially increment maybe one or two, but once we are consistently cranking we should see the trig 1 counter should not continually increment.
07:24	So, that's our first set of data that we're looking at and the other one is our trigger data over here, we want to look at our engine RPM.
07:32	You can also see this down here.
07:34	Basically, we're looking for realistic RPM values that are pretty consistent.
07:39	So, maybe for cranking on most engines this might be maybe 150 to 250 RPM.
07:45	But we want that to not be sort of jumping all over the place and we don't want to see sort of values of 2500 RPM and then dropping to zero.
07:53	So, let's crank our engine now and see what we actually are getting.
07:59	Alright, so we can see trig 1 and 2, yes, our engine speed sits consistently around 165 RPM.
08:06	We didn't increment our trig 1 counter when we started cranking, it actually did increment once when we stopped, but really what we're looking for there, the red flag is if it's continually incrementing as we are cranking.
08:18	So, at this stage we've got our trigger input set up correctly, we've tested these with both our scope and our runtime values and we know we are getting solid data.
08:27	At this point I should have the confidence that that is enough to get the engine running, so we can now move onto the next step of our process.