Roland@pcmtec

How did you guys go. Get everything working?

It's definitely on our too list

If you disable closed loop O2 do you still have a rich tip out? How does steady state and cruise look, spot on 14.7 ? Also what fuel pump are you running? If you have a walbro 460 or larger with the stock return lines and regulator you will get high pressure at idle/cruise which can cause erratic trims. Also the placement of your O2 sensor can play a part. Eg if the sensor is now much further away your short term fuel trims can struggle to maintain the AFR and overshoot on transient conditions, eg cause a rich rip out and then immediately after a lean tip in.

Another item the workshop version has is "populate unlicensed file" eg you can view (but not edit) unlicensed files that you have read from a vehicle. We also offer the Custom OS features to the workshop first as they have the ability to beta test and assist us by testing on a dyno etc. Finally we offer phone/screen sharing remote login support to workshops. Pro and enthusiast are forum/email only.

Very early build of the datalogging software.

We use the units that ford use in the calibration. We do convert some in the ZF but for simplicity we decided to not modify them in the PCM. We might offer the ability to change them in the future.

Tip out rich indicates your minimum pulse width or deadtime is wrong. Is DFCO working? If your deadtime is wrong DFCO won't work. You can tell when it kicks in as the exhaust note changes and there are zero backfires. What are your trims like on decel? If they are negative (rich) it also indicates the same thing.

Yes you have to change stoich, specific gravity you should change as well as whilst it doesn't make that much difference you might as well make it correct.

Yeah I guess from my own testing I just felt I had absolutely no way to quantify it, once you are over 350rwkw you aren't going to be getting traction on the street not to mention how dangerous it would get. So I just used the stock MBT numbers as a guide and extrapolated them for higher loads using excel. I assumed that if I'm not getting knock then providing I'm under these values I will be ok. Without the stock MBT numbers though I wouldn't be able to extrapolate the higher loads. Eg if you have 0s in all your spark table and wanted to determine them from first principles without a dyno, it would be extremely challenging. Eg at 0.8 load how do you determine the max timing an engine can take? I doubt you can feel the difference in torque at those levels. Leaving it stock is fine, but then you might be missing out on a lot of midrange. I guess you could just load the stock MBT values into the borderline knock, providing it doesn't knock you know you aren't going beyond MBT and running extreme pressures/temperatures. A lot of guess work and assumptions though. If the stock MBT values aren't right you are screwed. Spending a day or two on a dyno and you could recalc MBT for all the cells. Would be painful to do even with 12 second flashes but it would be the only true way to tune the motor correctly. I suspect not many people do all the cells, having inconsistent IAT and ECT would make it even harder.

In the case of tuning E85 on medium boost in these cars. If you tune via the road how do you know when to stop advancing timing if you never detect knock?

This is a good video for tuning spark full stop. It demonstrates why you can't really road tune effectively.

And remember on low boost you can run more timing than mbt and still not ping on e85 with these motors. Whilst they won't ping you will lift heads and melt pistons.

It uses closed loop and targets 14.7afr at all times. Same with cruise and low load. You can disable closed loop and run open loop at all times if you want. Read this thread

I know my opinions have changed a lot since starting a business. End of the day two things matter, solving a problem/adding value for the customer, and making money. If you don't add value for the customer, your product will suck and you will go out of business. On the other hand if you don't make money you will go out of business as well. So it is always a balance of juggling making your product as good as possible, but also turning a profit. The issue when your company gets huge like Derive/SCT etc is the CEO and top people often are so disconnected from the final product they don't actually know when they are no longer adding value for the customer. You see it all the time when a company gets too big, the support and quality tends to drop as there is a big disconnect from the owners, the developers and the end customer. We are lucky that we are all 3 at the moment. I hope we can continue to do our best at adding value by improving existing features or adding new ones (like the Custom OS etc) that no one else has and still be profitable as we grow. Our goal is to have software that everyone genuinely believes is better than the competition, I know we are not there in several areas to date but we will not stop until we are. To do this we will never be the cheapest but I am a big believer of you get what you pay for. On the other end of the spectrum I've seen a few packages pop up that offer credits for $25 a car, it is just not possible to provide quality support or service for this price.

Pro has access to these variables.

Yes it infers OSS via wheel speed from the ABS module. So if your diff ratio or tyre size is out it will also stop cruise control from working. I think only the very early BA's with no ABS run an actual OSS sensor, though I've never actually seen myself, others will know better.

You could also experiment with the selected cells in the 0 TPS A/D count row to make the fuel mixture leaner or richer. You would then need to experiment with this table to ensure that the vehicle stays in open loop fueling above a certain RPM. Don't set the RPM too low otherwise this will affect your fuel economy.

NA cars will always crackle and pop far more than a turbo due to the turbo muffling the sound but you can still do it on a turbo. The method to do it is via the decel spark and low load fueling. There is another thread about flames which discusses these maps. Eg if you set the decel spark to 0 degrees you will massively deafening backfires on deceleration. I tried it and it was extremely loud and very obnoxious. You need to disable DFCO as well by setting auF1265 "Minimum DFSO time delay seconds" to something like 8+ seconds (after 8seconds of decel it will shut off fuel). Note this parameter is only available in Professional and above. Try this for some muffler destruction. You will probably destroy the baffles in your muffler if you ran this for an extended period of time.

As Apoc mentioned above these are the parameters you will want to modify for the gear ratios. Afaik HPTuners don't have the minimum/maximum ratio mapped which I believe is used for determining an error which is what will be shutting the cruise control down. The min/max are for determining clutch slip. You may find this is causing the throttle to pull under big loads as well as there is clutch slip protection built into the PCM as well which will pull the throttle if the OSS doesn't match the rpm for an extended period of time.

Bump. Just updated this guide with some more information, an equation and some extra tables.

Not much in it for us, we originally were looking as we didn't have an alternative. Now that we have released the tablet flash only software for multiple tunes, total including a tablet and licensing is about $600 so similar pricing. Once the datalogging is complete we will add it to the tablet. This should effectively do eveything the ngauge can do plus more.

I suspect it is due to Jim Ferraro owning the distribution rights to the HPTuners nguage, hence they would have to give permission to nguage to allow them to give us access to their key used in the files. Which as you can see is very unlikely to happen. The fact most of our market will be using an existing nguage and not buying a new one, means that there is nothing really in it $ wise for them either, so I can understand why they seemed so uninterested.

There is absolutely no technical reason why not, however they said we would have to order and sell a pcmtec branded ngauge and they wouldn't support existing customers who already own one. That coupled with the fact they on average take a month to reply to emails meant we gave up on ngauge support. It is probably legal (and quicker) in Australia for us to reverse engineer support under interoperability laws however we don't really want to go there.

No automatic vehicles have launch control.

I believe they already stall up with no throttle limits? If not it will most likely be a different parameter in those. What are you seeing, throttle angle being pulled?