Update: 5/22/09:
Read the attached PDF first (at bottom of this post), then move on to this DL page for much more EFI info...
BOEFabrication.com | Beyond Original Equipment
I know there are MANY folks using EFI and many folks that are a bit intimidated to try and tweak their base maps. I've been compiling some tuning tips for EFI users that should help solve the common base map issues.
Once sorted, you'll love the EFI. It's not that there are bugs with the software, it just needs to be tuned- like any standalone ECU. You can dial this system into perfection and it's not too tough once you get the hang of it...
EFI Tuning Tips
Last updated 10/07/08
• Anyone considering the EFI, MUST MUST MUST be willing to learn atleast the basics of the software. Most any decent tuner will be able to get the car to run well on the dyno. The maps floating around will get your car close...perhaps very close, but not perfect (that's the point of a standalone- to fine tune).
There's no black magic in fine tuning a bit here and there to take a borrowed map and make it your map and work perfectly on your car.
It simply take *willingness to learn* the software and do a little tinkering. For small drivability issues, idle, cam change, starting, etc, you simply make a small change and go for a drive. Be sure to save your old map in a safe place and just start tweaking. Small or fine tuning will not blow your engine and doesn't take years of tuning to figure out. It just takes some experimentation and curiosity.
So how do you learn the software? Your best bet is the phone. Call the people that have the EFI and ask them. I bet they'll be happy to visit. Whether it's me, Kris, Dave, Casey, Fred, etc just give 'em a call. Then refer back to these tuning tips for reference... It's really quite fun, but you need to want to learn it...
Toggle between Graphical and Numeric Display:
• When looking at your maps, Right click on the current view to navigate to either Graphical or numeric displays. The graphical display is handy for smoothing and removing unnatural dips and spikes in your map. The Numeric display is best for making wholesale changes across large section of the map or doing interpolation (which is basically averaging between two points).
Making sense of the MAP Scale:
• The Map scale is in in/hg. To make it make sense of it to psi, the equation is as follows:
PSI= (“in/hg”-~30)/2 … In this case, ~30 is your local barometric pressure. We’ll use 30 for the sake of conversation (close enough for tuning in most cases). You should be at approximately 9 in/hg, as indicated by your EFI software at idle. Using the equation above, 7.5psi boost is about 45 in/hg as indicated in your EFI Maps.
• I’ve found it useful to tape a small psi to in/hg conversion cheat sheet to my laptop starting at 33in/hg going to 49in/hg until I fully memorized the values and what they meant in PSI of boost.
Making sense of Lambda:
• The EFI software is always going read and display AFR in terms with Lambda. Lambda is the universal tuning language for talking about AFR as it's the same regardless of the fuel you're using. Approximately 14.7 AFR is 1 Lambda. AFR= Displayed Lambda x 14.7 … So 0.80 Lambda is ~11.76 AFR… This is another opportunity to create a small cheat sheet with a Lambda to AFR conversion table and tape it to your laptop. It will become second nature before long.
Idle:
• Quick set points that should be maintained within your Idle
Constants in the Idle tab:
o Idle Cut Off RPM should be about twice that of your idle rpm
o Idle TPS cut off should be about 2 degrees greater than your resting idle TPS.
o IAC hertz should be set to 400.
• Oscillating, high and low idle:
o Start the car and bring to normal temps. Open the Idle section within EFI. Open “Idle Constants”. Adjust the Proportional Gain down by a factory or 10. Hit apply. Also ensure that “Integral Gain” is between 5 and 10. Let the idle stabilize after hitting apply and see if oscillating subsides. If not, adjust Proportional down about by 10 again Final P Gain values will likely be between 20 and 60 depending on the car).
o Once the oscillating subsides, stop adjusting the gain down and check your idling AFR’s. The idling AFRs should be in the 14’s or .97-1.0 Lambda. If not, open the “Injection” section and dbl click “Injection Map”. Turn on the “Active cursor” (the button found on the top of the screen. It is on when bright green. This feature simply moves the cursor to the cell the car is currently using). Note: In general ,you want the active cursor off when tuning, as the cursor may be forced to move away from the area of the map you’re intending to work on if the car is running. With the Active Cursor on (you’ll notice the cell the engine is running on will be highlighted), press the + or the – key on your keyboard in one stroke increments to achieve the desired AFR/lambda at idle. Obviously + increases the fuel and – decreases fuel. Be sure to bring the adjacent cells to a similar value so that you don’t have an unnatural looking spike or dip in the map. Be sure to rev the car several times to ensure that you’re getting.
• Weak idle or stalling engine (with or without the A/C on)
o Depending on the mods you’ve done to the car, you may find that your idle is weak and the car occasionally stalls, especially with the A/C on. The cure for this is within your throttle-stop and the above Oscillating procedure. If you’ve done the oscillating procedure, and you’re still stalling, adjust your throttle stop screw to open your throttle .5 degrees more than its current setting then try driving the car again. You’ll find the “happy spot” for a strong idle between 10 and 12 degrees. Once complete, you should go through the oscillating procedure again to be sure you’ve get the best idle possible. When done, you’ll have an idle that is rock steady under all conditions…
Hard Starting
• If the car is taking several revolutions to start, open your injection settings, then your injection constants. Raise your cranking injection by 1,000. My car likes about 7,000 in this value to start quickly. Also make sure that your cranking RPMs are set to about 500-600. This is the RPM figure that determines when the car switches over to your injection map rather than using your cranking injection that we just tweaked.
Choppy/hesitating Cold Running Characteristics:
• The engine likes more gas when it’s cold. Think of it like running with the choke on until warm. To add more “choke” or gas to the cold engine to eliminate the hesitating during warm up, open your “Corrections” tab in EFI. Then open the Injection vs Temp (engine temp) section. You’ll see a curve that slopes down as the engine increases in temp (in degrees C). The figures shown simply multiply the injection map values by the values you choose here. To add more fuel or “choke” the engine more, simply increase the height of the curve with your + and – keys. Be sure that you’re increasing the curve in the temp range that the car is running rough while cold. In other words, if your car is running rough when cold in the middle of the summer, focus your efforts on the curve between 20 and 50 degrees C---not -10 degrees C! That said, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll need less fuel at -10 C than at 20, so be sure to give your curve a table top or better for the temps cooler than what you’re currently working on.
EFI Cam Change
• The base maps I’ve seen tend to have the cam change really low in the RPMs (if sufficient load is present). This bit of advice is verging on tuning recommendations, which I don’t want to get much into, but I think the 4,200-4,800 Cam lift change is too low. For most, I think the low lift cam still pulls OK into the 5,000+ rpm range. I’ve selected 5,300 and it will take an act of Congress for me to change it again. Reason for that is that the fuel map has to change if the cam lift switch point is changed, and that’s not a task to be taken lightly since it involves dyno time to be done correctly-eek-
• Other important notes about cam lift and phasing.
o All cam variables are found in the VANOS tab. Much of this tab is dead for our cars (even if it looks like you can change stuff, most of it doesn’t apply).
oPhase: To change when the *intake* cam phases (retards/advances), you open the Constants in the VANOS tab. You can control both the RPM and the TPS parameters that effect this phase in the constants that address “intake”. In most cases, leave this alone on the base map, as this intake phasing on the base map is generally fine. Note: There is no way to adjust exhaust phasing, as it’s fixed in 2ZZ. If you change to the "bigger" cams, you may be able to clean up a lopy idle with this function... From what I've read, there's not a lot of power to be found in the phasing change of the intake cam on the stock cam... So again, leave it be on the base map unless you know otherwise...
oLift: This is the fun part. To change when the cams goes to high lift (both exhaust and intake cams switch lift together), you use the constants marked “exhaust”. You can adjust the TPS and RPMs required for the lift switch to take place. This is where I selected 5,300 in part due to torque curves and in part due to the rpms I pull around the sweepers at my track, as I don’t want lift changing much (or at all) at the track. The TPS adjustment changes the basic load that needs to be on the system before the switch takes place. This should be between 40 and 55 degrees for most folks. Try 45 and see how you like it. You may like more or less…
o In Review, the titles for the constants in this tab do not perfectly match what their functions actually are (this is the only place in the software that this happens), so take a look at the software and then read this again if that helps. The intake parameters impact phasing and the exhaust parameters impact lift (on the intake and exhaust cams together)…
Dual Maps for the ulitmate Street and Track car involving the Cams
To perfect setup for the street will need a different cam swtich setup than for the track to ensure you're silky smooth on track. Here's the best situation. Load a track map and a street map... Obviously you don't have to do this, but since you can- why not since we know what works best on the track isn't always the best on the street. You can switch between maps just by flipping a switch in the cabin, so there's no reason to compromise with a single map:evil:
On the track map, you basically make your cams switch at the best RPM for power (probably in the low 5,000 range), and never let them switch back down from a TPS drop. So, set your TPS trigger for something very low like 15 degrees (remember idle is between 10 and 12). That way you won't have your cams switch back down unless you drop below the rpm limit or come completely off the throttle..... You might recal that's similar to how the stock ECU worked. It didn't have a load based cam change. It just switched even if you feather-footed past 6,200 rpms...
The above is not great for the street if you lower your cam switch RPMs because your cam will be switching on light accell through town everytime you rev past your engagement rpm, which is now low enough (in the low 5,000s) that you'll be switching cams about the time you want to shift when you don't want to be around town. In our cars even light accell has you in the 5,000 rpm range--- for me anyway...
So the ideal street map will switch the cams with some load on the engine. I like the switch to take place around 43 degrees TPS. It has been a good compromise for street and aggressive driving. That allows a nice load based switch when I'm feeling froggy, but when I crusie to dinner with my wife, she doesn't have that loud high lift switch over despite shifting at 5,500 rpms or so...
For the track, flip the "map flipper switch" that came with the EFI kit and switch to your track map that will keep those cams on strong in high lift even as you modulate around the sweeper.
SAVE SAVE SAVE!
*Important* All maps MUST be saved in the “maps” folder found within the Power to Win software folder or the maps will not function properly. In other-words, when we all are trading maps back and forth, be sure to save the file directly to “maps” directory that was created when you first installed the EFI software (known as “Power to Win”).
I recommend that you back up good working maps in a directory outside of your “maps” directory just incase you do something really silly in your tuning attempts
One of the best things you can do is Save your work. If you're making a small change here or there, just save the file you're woking on by hitting the save icon in the upper left.
If you're making big changes, do a file, Save as, under a new name BEFORE YOU MAKE THE CHANGES. After doing that, click the "replace file" icon (next to the save icon) and replace the existing file with your new file you just created. Now make you changes.
Another thing to know is that as you tweak the program, if the car is running and on-line, you're making LIVE changes to the ECU and the map and it saves each time a change it made, even if you don't hit Save on the laptop. If you lose power to the EFI or the laptop prior to hitting save on the laptop, your map WILL BE SAVED only within the EFI IN THE CAR, but NOT THE LAPTOP (I cap because this is important). When power is restored, you'll be prompted to replace the map on the laptop with the map that's on the EFI in the car or vise-a-versa. Generally, you want to replace the map on the laptop with what's in the car, since the car saves live and the one in the laptop doesn't save until you tell it to...
All that said, you'll want to develop a system that allows you to go back in time to previous maps should you ever choose to. I do that everyonce in a while just as a reminder of what I 'used' to be happy with compared to what I have now I basically change to a different phonetic alphabit name each time I make a BIG change and then add dot 1, 2, 3, etc for small changes as I clean things up from the big change... For instance I'm on Golf.5 right now. (I must admit that I skipped "Charlie" as to not add confusion to anyone working from my maps. No offense Charlie!!!!). I also like to add any other key things about the tune like when the cam change is. In my case, it's at 5,300 right now. So Golf.5.CAM5300... There are other important descriptors like PID (which is basically closed loop opertation) that I put in the file name as well... I'll get to what and how PID works later... It's pretty simple and very cool...
More to come later....
Best,
Phil
Read the attached PDF first (at bottom of this post), then move on to this DL page for much more EFI info...
BOEFabrication.com | Beyond Original Equipment
I know there are MANY folks using EFI and many folks that are a bit intimidated to try and tweak their base maps. I've been compiling some tuning tips for EFI users that should help solve the common base map issues.
Once sorted, you'll love the EFI. It's not that there are bugs with the software, it just needs to be tuned- like any standalone ECU. You can dial this system into perfection and it's not too tough once you get the hang of it...
EFI Tuning Tips
Last updated 10/07/08
• Anyone considering the EFI, MUST MUST MUST be willing to learn atleast the basics of the software. Most any decent tuner will be able to get the car to run well on the dyno. The maps floating around will get your car close...perhaps very close, but not perfect (that's the point of a standalone- to fine tune).
There's no black magic in fine tuning a bit here and there to take a borrowed map and make it your map and work perfectly on your car.
It simply take *willingness to learn* the software and do a little tinkering. For small drivability issues, idle, cam change, starting, etc, you simply make a small change and go for a drive. Be sure to save your old map in a safe place and just start tweaking. Small or fine tuning will not blow your engine and doesn't take years of tuning to figure out. It just takes some experimentation and curiosity.
So how do you learn the software? Your best bet is the phone. Call the people that have the EFI and ask them. I bet they'll be happy to visit. Whether it's me, Kris, Dave, Casey, Fred, etc just give 'em a call. Then refer back to these tuning tips for reference... It's really quite fun, but you need to want to learn it...
Toggle between Graphical and Numeric Display:
• When looking at your maps, Right click on the current view to navigate to either Graphical or numeric displays. The graphical display is handy for smoothing and removing unnatural dips and spikes in your map. The Numeric display is best for making wholesale changes across large section of the map or doing interpolation (which is basically averaging between two points).
Making sense of the MAP Scale:
• The Map scale is in in/hg. To make it make sense of it to psi, the equation is as follows:
PSI= (“in/hg”-~30)/2 … In this case, ~30 is your local barometric pressure. We’ll use 30 for the sake of conversation (close enough for tuning in most cases). You should be at approximately 9 in/hg, as indicated by your EFI software at idle. Using the equation above, 7.5psi boost is about 45 in/hg as indicated in your EFI Maps.
• I’ve found it useful to tape a small psi to in/hg conversion cheat sheet to my laptop starting at 33in/hg going to 49in/hg until I fully memorized the values and what they meant in PSI of boost.
Making sense of Lambda:
• The EFI software is always going read and display AFR in terms with Lambda. Lambda is the universal tuning language for talking about AFR as it's the same regardless of the fuel you're using. Approximately 14.7 AFR is 1 Lambda. AFR= Displayed Lambda x 14.7 … So 0.80 Lambda is ~11.76 AFR… This is another opportunity to create a small cheat sheet with a Lambda to AFR conversion table and tape it to your laptop. It will become second nature before long.
Idle:
• Quick set points that should be maintained within your Idle
Constants in the Idle tab:
o Idle Cut Off RPM should be about twice that of your idle rpm
o Idle TPS cut off should be about 2 degrees greater than your resting idle TPS.
o IAC hertz should be set to 400.
• Oscillating, high and low idle:
o Start the car and bring to normal temps. Open the Idle section within EFI. Open “Idle Constants”. Adjust the Proportional Gain down by a factory or 10. Hit apply. Also ensure that “Integral Gain” is between 5 and 10. Let the idle stabilize after hitting apply and see if oscillating subsides. If not, adjust Proportional down about by 10 again Final P Gain values will likely be between 20 and 60 depending on the car).
o Once the oscillating subsides, stop adjusting the gain down and check your idling AFR’s. The idling AFRs should be in the 14’s or .97-1.0 Lambda. If not, open the “Injection” section and dbl click “Injection Map”. Turn on the “Active cursor” (the button found on the top of the screen. It is on when bright green. This feature simply moves the cursor to the cell the car is currently using). Note: In general ,you want the active cursor off when tuning, as the cursor may be forced to move away from the area of the map you’re intending to work on if the car is running. With the Active Cursor on (you’ll notice the cell the engine is running on will be highlighted), press the + or the – key on your keyboard in one stroke increments to achieve the desired AFR/lambda at idle. Obviously + increases the fuel and – decreases fuel. Be sure to bring the adjacent cells to a similar value so that you don’t have an unnatural looking spike or dip in the map. Be sure to rev the car several times to ensure that you’re getting.
• Weak idle or stalling engine (with or without the A/C on)
o Depending on the mods you’ve done to the car, you may find that your idle is weak and the car occasionally stalls, especially with the A/C on. The cure for this is within your throttle-stop and the above Oscillating procedure. If you’ve done the oscillating procedure, and you’re still stalling, adjust your throttle stop screw to open your throttle .5 degrees more than its current setting then try driving the car again. You’ll find the “happy spot” for a strong idle between 10 and 12 degrees. Once complete, you should go through the oscillating procedure again to be sure you’ve get the best idle possible. When done, you’ll have an idle that is rock steady under all conditions…
Hard Starting
• If the car is taking several revolutions to start, open your injection settings, then your injection constants. Raise your cranking injection by 1,000. My car likes about 7,000 in this value to start quickly. Also make sure that your cranking RPMs are set to about 500-600. This is the RPM figure that determines when the car switches over to your injection map rather than using your cranking injection that we just tweaked.
Choppy/hesitating Cold Running Characteristics:
• The engine likes more gas when it’s cold. Think of it like running with the choke on until warm. To add more “choke” or gas to the cold engine to eliminate the hesitating during warm up, open your “Corrections” tab in EFI. Then open the Injection vs Temp (engine temp) section. You’ll see a curve that slopes down as the engine increases in temp (in degrees C). The figures shown simply multiply the injection map values by the values you choose here. To add more fuel or “choke” the engine more, simply increase the height of the curve with your + and – keys. Be sure that you’re increasing the curve in the temp range that the car is running rough while cold. In other words, if your car is running rough when cold in the middle of the summer, focus your efforts on the curve between 20 and 50 degrees C---not -10 degrees C! That said, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll need less fuel at -10 C than at 20, so be sure to give your curve a table top or better for the temps cooler than what you’re currently working on.
EFI Cam Change
• The base maps I’ve seen tend to have the cam change really low in the RPMs (if sufficient load is present). This bit of advice is verging on tuning recommendations, which I don’t want to get much into, but I think the 4,200-4,800 Cam lift change is too low. For most, I think the low lift cam still pulls OK into the 5,000+ rpm range. I’ve selected 5,300 and it will take an act of Congress for me to change it again. Reason for that is that the fuel map has to change if the cam lift switch point is changed, and that’s not a task to be taken lightly since it involves dyno time to be done correctly-eek-
• Other important notes about cam lift and phasing.
o All cam variables are found in the VANOS tab. Much of this tab is dead for our cars (even if it looks like you can change stuff, most of it doesn’t apply).
oPhase: To change when the *intake* cam phases (retards/advances), you open the Constants in the VANOS tab. You can control both the RPM and the TPS parameters that effect this phase in the constants that address “intake”. In most cases, leave this alone on the base map, as this intake phasing on the base map is generally fine. Note: There is no way to adjust exhaust phasing, as it’s fixed in 2ZZ. If you change to the "bigger" cams, you may be able to clean up a lopy idle with this function... From what I've read, there's not a lot of power to be found in the phasing change of the intake cam on the stock cam... So again, leave it be on the base map unless you know otherwise...
oLift: This is the fun part. To change when the cams goes to high lift (both exhaust and intake cams switch lift together), you use the constants marked “exhaust”. You can adjust the TPS and RPMs required for the lift switch to take place. This is where I selected 5,300 in part due to torque curves and in part due to the rpms I pull around the sweepers at my track, as I don’t want lift changing much (or at all) at the track. The TPS adjustment changes the basic load that needs to be on the system before the switch takes place. This should be between 40 and 55 degrees for most folks. Try 45 and see how you like it. You may like more or less…
o In Review, the titles for the constants in this tab do not perfectly match what their functions actually are (this is the only place in the software that this happens), so take a look at the software and then read this again if that helps. The intake parameters impact phasing and the exhaust parameters impact lift (on the intake and exhaust cams together)…
Dual Maps for the ulitmate Street and Track car involving the Cams
To perfect setup for the street will need a different cam swtich setup than for the track to ensure you're silky smooth on track. Here's the best situation. Load a track map and a street map... Obviously you don't have to do this, but since you can- why not since we know what works best on the track isn't always the best on the street. You can switch between maps just by flipping a switch in the cabin, so there's no reason to compromise with a single map:evil:
On the track map, you basically make your cams switch at the best RPM for power (probably in the low 5,000 range), and never let them switch back down from a TPS drop. So, set your TPS trigger for something very low like 15 degrees (remember idle is between 10 and 12). That way you won't have your cams switch back down unless you drop below the rpm limit or come completely off the throttle..... You might recal that's similar to how the stock ECU worked. It didn't have a load based cam change. It just switched even if you feather-footed past 6,200 rpms...
The above is not great for the street if you lower your cam switch RPMs because your cam will be switching on light accell through town everytime you rev past your engagement rpm, which is now low enough (in the low 5,000s) that you'll be switching cams about the time you want to shift when you don't want to be around town. In our cars even light accell has you in the 5,000 rpm range--- for me anyway...
So the ideal street map will switch the cams with some load on the engine. I like the switch to take place around 43 degrees TPS. It has been a good compromise for street and aggressive driving. That allows a nice load based switch when I'm feeling froggy, but when I crusie to dinner with my wife, she doesn't have that loud high lift switch over despite shifting at 5,500 rpms or so...
For the track, flip the "map flipper switch" that came with the EFI kit and switch to your track map that will keep those cams on strong in high lift even as you modulate around the sweeper.
SAVE SAVE SAVE!
*Important* All maps MUST be saved in the “maps” folder found within the Power to Win software folder or the maps will not function properly. In other-words, when we all are trading maps back and forth, be sure to save the file directly to “maps” directory that was created when you first installed the EFI software (known as “Power to Win”).
I recommend that you back up good working maps in a directory outside of your “maps” directory just incase you do something really silly in your tuning attempts
One of the best things you can do is Save your work. If you're making a small change here or there, just save the file you're woking on by hitting the save icon in the upper left.
If you're making big changes, do a file, Save as, under a new name BEFORE YOU MAKE THE CHANGES. After doing that, click the "replace file" icon (next to the save icon) and replace the existing file with your new file you just created. Now make you changes.
Another thing to know is that as you tweak the program, if the car is running and on-line, you're making LIVE changes to the ECU and the map and it saves each time a change it made, even if you don't hit Save on the laptop. If you lose power to the EFI or the laptop prior to hitting save on the laptop, your map WILL BE SAVED only within the EFI IN THE CAR, but NOT THE LAPTOP (I cap because this is important). When power is restored, you'll be prompted to replace the map on the laptop with the map that's on the EFI in the car or vise-a-versa. Generally, you want to replace the map on the laptop with what's in the car, since the car saves live and the one in the laptop doesn't save until you tell it to...
All that said, you'll want to develop a system that allows you to go back in time to previous maps should you ever choose to. I do that everyonce in a while just as a reminder of what I 'used' to be happy with compared to what I have now I basically change to a different phonetic alphabit name each time I make a BIG change and then add dot 1, 2, 3, etc for small changes as I clean things up from the big change... For instance I'm on Golf.5 right now. (I must admit that I skipped "Charlie" as to not add confusion to anyone working from my maps. No offense Charlie!!!!). I also like to add any other key things about the tune like when the cam change is. In my case, it's at 5,300 right now. So Golf.5.CAM5300... There are other important descriptors like PID (which is basically closed loop opertation) that I put in the file name as well... I'll get to what and how PID works later... It's pretty simple and very cool...
More to come later....
Best,
Phil