Version 0.60 (ZF Release) - Friday February 9th

[Darryl@pcmtec]

PCMTec is excited to announce that on Friday 9th of February we released ZF tuning for Professional and Workshop Customers. Never before has such tuning capabilities been available for the Australian Fords. 

To download please login then visit https://www.pcmtec.com/downloads This page is only available for customers who have purchased the full version of the software (Professional and Workshop).

The Professional version will be shipped with two selections of the parameter level. Professional will provide all the tuning capabilities that exist on our competitors products plus some extra useful things like Differential Ratio and times for downshift.

The next level of parameters is a whole new world of ZF tuning for the Australian Fords. PCMTec have gone through all the factory ZF files and found when the OEM was making changes across the calibrations. So for example we compared all the ZF tunes to each other and collected the parameters that were being altered in the factory by Ford, all of these parameters have been marked as "OEM Areas".

Should you wish to view only the new parameters you can select "OEM Areas" under the "View" dropdown menu and untick the other levels.

All the parameters that do not exist in other products will be under new tree entries such as "ZF PCMTec Clutch Controls". Here are the new areas in PCMTec that are new for people using other products:

And an expanded:

Here is a brief summary of some of the extra features:

• Gear Controls: filling switching and ramp pressures for each gear
• RPM and Shaft Speed controls: Limits on driving ranges, range switching acceleration limits, coast, upper engine speeds on tip in
• Pedal and Throttle Limits: Pedal limits/Minimum throttle limit for kick down
• Ramp and Boost Pressures: Clutch ramp and boost pressures for for the BF and FG Falocns
• Shift Prevention and Forbidden Actions: Upshift and downshift prevention tables and tables of forbidden shifts
• Shift Properties:  Additional tables and scalars to control shift between gears such as ramp and pressure gradients.
• System: Diff ratio as well an many temperature controls
• Transmission Delays: Delay times for downshift (eg 2nd to 1st) , off going clutch and closing ramp gradients.

Over 1000 additional parameters have been identified using this technique. 

These extra parameters unsure you that when you compare against another tune (or stock file) you will be able to change the tune so that it matches the compared to tune and you know these are the areas the Manufacturer tunes in and hence it will be the same tune. Very handy when you want the calibration of the XR6 Sprint ZF in your XR6 Turbo or G6E Turbo.

Workshop version has even more parameters, these however are not usually changed by Ford. More than likely these setup parameters and would be required if you changed a clutch type or converter.

When you read both the PCM and ZF TCM a single .TEC File containing both the ZF and PCM calibrations will be produced. These will then be visible within a single Navigator tree.

If you have previously read a PCM and would like to now read your TCM into the same file, this can be done by simply opening the file before performing a read. Another method is via "File Import ECM"

TCM Flashing

TCM/PCM information can be read from the following screen.

TCM Flash read and write can be performed from the following new screens.

Features new to 0.60.

We now have a graph view for lookup tables. These are view only with drag/edit support coming soon.

.TEC File association. Double clicking on a .TEC file will now automatically open the editor and view the currently open file.

Bug Fixes/Improvements

• Added "Send Logs to Support" in the Help dropdown menu. This will automatically upload your log files to our server. Please use this only if we request you to.
• Added "Send File to Support" in the Help  dropdown menu. This will upload any file that is < 10MB to our server. Please use this only if we request you to send us a .tec file.
• Cells with unsaved changes now have black text. Previously the white text on the pale red background was unreadable.
• Navigator remembers previous expanded state.
• Saving to a folder being watched by google drive/dropbox would sometimes give access/denied. Editor will now retry 10x with 500ms delay in between. This logic is also used on all other open/save operations.
• Editing fields such as VIN/Strategy would show a warning for each character. Now you are only warned once per session.
• Mixture of UTC and Local dates were used, all date formats are now Local Time.
• If Internet was not connected at startup but connected later login details (such as credit count etc) would not be updated causing a failure to license if you had bought credits and not restarted the application.
• Flash read/write on small 14" laptop screens would push the close button off the screen. Layout changed so Close button can always be seen.
• Occasionally Flash progress would say 99.9% or flicker between 0 and the actual value despite flashing successfully. This no longer occurs.
• If you switch account logins the previous .dat templates would remain. These would often cause new licenses to not download correctly. Now if you switch logged in accounts the templates are automatically cleared.
• Demo level drop down menu was greyed out.
• Enthusiast demo files were missing several templates.
• Some units appeared as "Unitless" and had inconsitent descriptions between the lower resolution BF tables and the higher resolution FG tables. These descriptions have been fixed.
• Various other minor bug fixes.