Summary

In this webinar we will cover the process of two-way CAN communications between the Turbo Lamik TCU and a Haltech Nexus R3 ECU. We will also cover some of the hard wired inputs to the Haltech that we have used and explain why we use them.

00:00 It's Andre from High Performance Academy, welcome to another one of our webinars.
00:04 And in this webinar we're going to be talking about the CAN communication in two directions between the turbo LAMIC TCU that's very common for controlling the ZF8HP gearbox and in this particular example we're going to be communicating between the turbo LAMIC TCU and a Haltech Nexus R3 ECU.
00:24 Obviously, the specifics of communication between different ECUs are going to vary.
00:28 However, the generalisations around what we're doing and what I'm going to demonstrate are going to be largely similar.
00:34 So, even if you're not dealing with a Haltech ECU, there's going to be a lot to take away from today's lesson.
00:40 As with some of our other turbo LAMIC 8HP webinars, this is being pre recorded so that we can make the most of the car while we have it available.
00:49 So, of course we won't be able to take questions live, however I will be happy to answer any questions you may have later in the forum, so please direct your questions there.
00:59 Now, we've already got a few turbo LAMIC slash 8HP webinars here, so I'm not going to really repeat myself with the intro, but essentially the 8HP, very common late model eight speed automatic transmission is becoming increasingly popular for transmission swaps and the turbo LAMIC TCU is becoming one of the most popular for controlling the 8HP gearbox.
01:22 If you do want more information, go back to our introductory webinar that you'll find in our archive and that should answer all of your questions.
01:30 So, we're going to dive straight in here and essentially what we need in order to make the 8HP gearbox do everything that it should, when it should, is communication from the ECU it's connected to.
01:42 Essentially it's really really critical that the 8HP gearbox and the turbo LAMIC TCU accurately know what the engine torque is at any particular point in time.
01:52 The reason this is important is because the clutch pressures and the shift speed, everything to do with the shift quality is based around the amount of torque the engine is producing.
02:03 Essentially for an upshift with an engine that's producing 100 newton metres versus 200 newton metres, if we're making 200 newton metres of torque, we're going to need to apply more clutch pressure in order to make the gearbox shift without the clutches excessively slipping.
02:19 Now, hopefully you can understand though that if you apply the logic for a 200 newton metre shift, but your engine's only making 100 newton metres, that's going to be a result of a harsh or unnecessarily harsh shift.
02:32 So, a lot of the problems around drivability with the 8HP swaps is because that torque calculation isn't working properly, isn't calculated correctly.
02:41 Now, I'm not getting into that within this webinar, we've got another webinar which you can watch around how to go about that or if you want a full rundown on setting up the 8HP, we've got a full worked example in our Practical Transmission Tuning course.
02:56 But really the basis of this is the information that the TCU needs in order to correctly calculate torque.
03:03 Now, if you're dealing with certain aftermarket standalone ECUs or late model factory ECUs, then they are constantly outputting engine torque, job done.
03:13 With most aftermarket standalones though we don't have that luxury and instead we're relying on an internal torque calculation table inside the Tuner Pro software, so let's just have a quick look at that.
03:24 What we're going to do is come into our base torque table with RPM versus map.
03:28 This one is in newton metres, there is another table, identical, which is in pound foot if you prefer to work in pound foot.
03:34 But as you can see what we've got here on our vertical axis is our manifold pressure and on our horizontal axis we've got our engine RPM numbers inside of this table, our torque in newton metres, there's another table that has a multiplier effect based on manifold pressure for turbocharged or supercharged cars.
03:51 We can see that in real time we are seeing whereabouts we're operating in this table.
03:55 The table is not the focus of this though.
03:58 Obviously, you should be able to pick up from this that in order for the turbo lambic to be able to populate this table and for us to know where it's operating in this table I should say, it's our job to populate it, we need manifold absolute pressure and we need engine RPM and that is being communicated from the Haltech to the turbo lamic TCU.
04:17 There's also communication in the other direction, so the turbo lamic will output gear position, vehicle speed, torque reduction requests and a range of other information, transmission temperature as well.
04:29 But before any of this can work, we need to set up our CAN communication.
04:34 Part of this of course is the hard wiring of that CAN bus and I'm going to assume within this webinar that you understand how to do that and you've got that set up.
04:44 We've got various webinars on CAN wiring.
04:46 If you're a little bit fuzzy on the details, but it's essential that we have CAN high and CAN low correctly wired, they have to be a twisted pair and we also need terminating resistors depending on the layout of your bus.
04:58 Now, we aren't left guessing with all of this information here on the setup.
05:01 If we come across to turbo lamic's website, we do have their manual.
05:06 Manual in air quotes, it is very simplified here and there's a lot of information or strategies, features, functionality, parameters in the turbo lamic that I really don't feel are properly documented at this stage, but at this point we've got enough to at least set up our Haltech communication.
05:24 What we want to do in order to do that is come down to our standalone ECUs.
05:27 I should mention here you'll find this on the resources page of the turbo lamic website and under standalone ECUs we have all of the currently supported ECUs.
05:38 Of course, we've clicked on Haltech here and that takes us to this particular point.
05:42 We start here with our TCU configuration.
05:45 There is a note here about whether or not we're using a drive by wire input.
05:49 In our case we are, tells you what to do there within the sensor cal setup, but we'll carry on with our CAN bus.
05:55 So, what we can see here is for a start our CAN bus setup for CAN 2A, type car, eight and our CAN bus speed is four.
06:05 Probably doesn't mean too much right now, but let's come back to Tuner Pro, shut down everything else that we've got here to make things a little bit simpler and this is where we'll find our CAN bus setup.
06:16 What we want to start by doing actually, we'll just close down our transmit and here we've got those two parameters, our type car and our speed, so we'll open those up and if you hover over this you can see a list of the supported ECUs.
06:31 So, don't necessarily need to be doing this from the website, but of course we've got that information, so we'll open that up as well as our CAN 2 speed and again obviously we've set those up already as per the recommendations.
06:45 If we hover over speed we can see that four there is one megabit per second which is pretty typical for aftermarket standalone ECUs.
06:52 Let's head back to the website and see what else we need to do.
06:55 Now, we've also got our custom CAN transmit setup.
06:59 So, this is the transmission of information from the TCU back to the Haltech ECU.
07:05 So, again we've got the send ID 704 and let's just go back and have a quick look at that in Tuner Pro.
07:12 Alright, so now we'll open up our custom CAN transmit.
07:17 Let's close these ones down here just for simplicity.
07:20 And we can see we've got our send ID, 704, just as we can see we're supposed to set it up on the website and then we've got our send ID zero and our send ID plus one.
07:32 We've got these both set which is our little tick box here.
07:36 So, that's exactly set up as it should be, let's close all of that down.
07:40 So, now we've got everything set up as required.
07:43 We also have to have a look here and set up our analogue CAN out maximum value.
07:49 So, again as per the recommendations on the website, we need to set this for the Haltech to a value of 4095.
07:56 Essentially how this works, we'll look at this in the Haltech software shortly, is that the Turbolimic TCU is emulating the Haltech IO box A and IO box B.
08:07 These are designed for expansion of the Haltech ECU and you can essentially wire four analogue voltage inputs into each of those IO boxes which is then transmitted to the Haltech ECU via CAN.
08:20 Of course, those wired inputs are zero to five volts and this 4095 value basically sets the range to a maximum of five volts.
08:30 So, that's important, otherwise we're going to end up with a situation where essentially the scaling of our inputs is going to be incorrect.
08:38 Now, we can have a look at our analogue CAN out.
08:41 So, these are the actual channels that are going to be transmitted.
08:44 So, analogue one through to four are emulating IO box A and five through to eight are emulating IO box B.
08:53 And if we hover over this we can see the different channels that are being transmitted.
08:57 So, we can see analogue one is set to a value of 13 and that is our transmission oil temperature.
09:02 Analogue two is our gear target, so that's the gear we're looking for.
09:08 In this case analogue three is set to 24 which is TPS, not quite sure why we'd want two way communication of TPS, but you've got that option.
09:17 And analogue four is set to, sorry analogue four is set to 27 which is our virtual clutch.
09:24 So, those are the current channels being sent through.
09:27 Obviously, you can configure these to suit whatever you personally want.
09:32 Word of warning here though, something I've found through experimentation and also talking to various others that have set up the Haltech, it appears that the communication speed between the IO boxes and the Haltech ECU is documented at around 10 hertz and potentially is actually happening a little slower than that.
09:50 So, be mindful of what you want to bring in via CAN and how mission critical that data is versus hard wiring some of those inputs which is what we've done here.
10:00 So, we've got kind of a combination of hard wired versus CAN input.
10:05 Let's jump into our Haltech software and see what we've got set up in here.
10:09 Actually, before we do that, let's go back across to the turbo Lamec manual.
10:13 And we can see here again we don't have to make this up, it does give us a bit of a guide here as to how all of this works and how we need to set up each of these aspects.
10:24 Particularly important when we come to setting up our transmission gear detection position as well, the voltages here are important, so that we actually get this set up and it can properly detect gears.
10:36 Head back over to our Haltech software now.
10:38 The first port of call here is to go to our Haltech CAN system and we need to make sure, that our IO expander box A and B are both enabled, of course that's the basis of all of that communication.
10:50 Once we've got that set up then we can start going ahead and setting up some of our functionality.
10:55 Now, we've got our wired inputs here and we've got CAN inputs.
10:59 So, let's just start with a CAN input and we'll go in this case to our generics and we'll click on generics and we can enable or disable as many of these as we need.
11:09 We've got three generic input sensors set up and one of these here is our gear target.
11:16 So, we've called that gear target, we can obviously call this whatever we want.
11:21 And if we go to our wiring here we can see that this is wired up to our expander box A and that is on input analog voltage two.
11:32 Let's just head back to our TCU and we'll have a quick look at that.
11:36 So, that is analog two and if we come back down to our analog two, we can see that 14 is in fact our gear target.
11:44 Right, back to our Haltech, we know that we're on the right track there.
11:47 We can see that this is actually already showing us our voltage.
11:51 So, we've got that voltage input there and currently I'm sitting here in park.
11:55 But if I just pull on the lever we can see that voltage jumps from 0.5 to 1.5.
11:59 So, this is a CAN input, it's doing exactly what we've asked.
12:04 Now, I'm not actually using that though, I wanted to show you that as well as a wired input.
12:10 So, that's the first of our generic inputs and obviously we can set up as many generic inputs as we want, we've got those eight inputs and we can choose what we want to have coming in there.
12:20 Alright, next let's have a look at another one of our CAN inputs and this one will be our transmission oil temperature.
12:26 Just to remind you here, we'll go back to our TCU here and we can see if we hover over this, our transmission oil temp is output 13 and we can see that we've got that on IO box A, analog voltage one.
12:40 OK, so now we know what we're dealing with there, we'll go back to our Haltech software and we'll find this actually under sensors.
12:45 We've already got a predefined sensor for transmission oil temperature, so we can come down to that.
12:50 And we need to have obviously a conversion or scaling factor here, so that's what this table here is.
12:57 Basically, remember that the CAN output is replicating or emulating a 0 to 5 volt output, so in our table here we've got 0 and 5 volts and we've got in our degree C, 0 to 200, where on earth do we get that information from? Again of course we don't have to guess, we'll come back to our TCU, hover up over our CAN output and we can see that under, I can't get to it, but you can see under 13 oil temperature, it gives us that scaling there, 0 volts equals 0 degrees C, 5 volts equals 200 degrees C.
13:27 That's where that information is coming from.
13:29 We'll head back over here and we'll come down to our wiring and here we can see that this is assigned to our IO box A and AVI1.
13:40 So, exactly what we'd expect.
13:42 Now, of course I've got this assigned here.
13:44 If it wasn't we can click assign and we can go up to our IO box A.
13:48 Of course, we don't have that spare at the moment, so otherwise this would show up in this little list here and we can select that from our list.
13:56 OK, so there we go and we've got our voltage there sitting at 1.35 volts.
14:01 And we can bring up a display here.
14:05 Let's bring up a number display and we'll search for transmission temperature.
14:10 Transmission oil temperature, there we go, 54 degrees C.
14:14 So, everything's working quite nicely there and we can move that around to suit or in this case I'm just going to get rid of it for the meantime.
14:23 Now, let's have a look at how we've got some wired inputs coming in.
14:27 We've already looked at our gear voltage, or our gear target I should say, coming in as a CAN input.
14:33 In this case I've wired these as well, wired our gear position in.
14:39 So, if we come back, let's just close down our engine sensors to make things a little bit cleaner here, we'll close down our generics and we'll come to transmission and there's a bit to set up here.
14:48 This isn't a webinar enabling you to completely set up the transmission so, I'm not gonna go over everything, but what we can see here is our gear detection type is via gear position sensor and we've got our number of forward gears here set to seven.
15:01 Now, you might be wondering why I've set this to seven when the 8HP has eight gears.
15:07 Depending on final drive it's quite common to actually lock out first gear which is exactly what we're doing here.
15:12 Essentially first gear is just too low to really truly be useful, so that's why we've set that to seven.
15:19 Now, we've got our gear detection wiring, we'll click on that and we can see that we've got that coming in from AVOI seven.
15:26 So, this is a wide input to the R3 ECU.
15:29 Remember this is not an emulated CAN input.
15:32 And what we can see is we've got that sitting over here on the left hand side, sitting at 0.5 volts.
15:39 Now, I can see that this one, because it is a genuine analogue voltage, it is moving around a tiny bit.
15:45 The CAN emulated input was rock solid at 0.5 volts.
15:50 Then we have our gear detection position and this is where we can set our voltage for each of these gears.
15:57 Again we can simply reference the values from this table on the Turbolimic website as well, so again we don't have to guess that.
16:05 So, at this point we've got our transmission temperature coming in, we've got our gear position coming in via CAN and our gear position coming in as a wide input.
16:14 We also want to look at shift requests.
16:16 So, we will come down to our shift requests here.
16:20 And we've set these up as paddle shift inputs.
16:22 So, basically the Turbolimic is outputting a switch output for an upshift request and a downshift request.
16:29 We can use these for flat shift and torque reduction and throttle blip on our downshifts.
16:36 So, I've got our paddle shift inputs here.
16:38 So, we can see our paddle shift options, we've got up and down paddles.
16:43 And if we come into our wiring down below, we can see that our upshift paddle is set to SPi2, we've got our downshift paddle set to SPi1 and we can see the voltage coming in here.
17:00 So, if I just pull back here, we're sitting at five volts and as I pull back, happens very quickly, but should have seen that go to zero, I'll do that one more time.
17:08 Gotta be pretty quick off the mark to get it, but here we go, three, two, one.
17:11 Yeah it drops to zero.
17:13 Then if we look, this should also work, if we look at our down paddle at the moment, I'm in first gear, we'll push forward, that should drop to zero which is exactly what it does.
17:22 Now, again just the reason that I want these hard wired is because of that relatively slow update rate for the IO boxes.
17:31 Obviously, if we're looking at shift requests we want these to be crisp and instantaneous which is why we've wired them.
17:37 So, there we go, at this point we've looked at how to set up the two way communication, the receive parameters in the TCU in the Tuner Pro software.
17:47 We've looked and made sure that those numbers actually do match, they're making sense.
17:51 We've looked at how to set up our transmit, how we can choose the channels that we want to transmit and then how we can set up both our CAN inputs received into the Haltech ECU as generic or configured sensors such as our transmission oil temperature and we've looked at how we can set up our wired inputs as well for our shift requests and our gear position.
18:14 That brings us to the end of this particular webinar.
18:16 Remember if you do have any questions on anything that we've just looked at, please ask those in the forum and I'll answer them there.