Mapping questions

[dkrevs]

I originally sent this message to chip, but he said it would be a shame not sharing with other forum members. All you people are very welcome to add your opinion/experience to this discussion.

Hi there my friend.

Hope you can answer me some questions.
Engine mapping. Been reading quite a lot about it lately. Particularly Dave Walker's book on engine management. I have now a better understanding of engine mapping and standalone management systems.

What I would like to know is what's your opinion on Emerald M3DK system and IIRC you said it's kind of old and slow to work on?
How do you map a car on the street?
How can anything be decently mapped without rollers with brake?
Do you left foot brake the car while you adjust the injection map at given load and speed site(otherwise RPM's would instantly rise and you can't hold the engine, I mean you can but only at one load which gives a given RPM)?

That will be enough for now. Still have many questions tho.

Anyway thanks for your help in advance.

Cheers

David

PS: I may have written some things a bit clumsy, hopefully you'll understand.

[chip]

Hopefully now its on the forum you'll get input from other people who map too not just me.

Yeah I am not a fan of the emerald, I've mapped quite a few cars on it now and the reason I dont like it is that I like to make lots of small changes while mapping and with the emerald when you want to edit a cell you have to do so, then press to say you want the ecu to be updated with the value, then it says are you sure, then you hit enter, then it goes and does it and then comes back and tells you it has done it and asks you to hit return to acknowledge that it has done the thing you entered for it to do, then set it to update, then confirmed you wanted to update.
Just far too many keypresses just to make a simple change IMHO, feels very cumbersome compared to Autronic or Mtech or Omex which I map all of often and much prefer.

Mapping a car on the street I use det cans to make sure that there is no detonation occuring and I use a wideband to see the fuelling, sometimes I also use a phormula knock detector as well.

It depends what ecu I am using wether I use the datalogging or just do it from memory as im running it up and down, Autronic SM4 for example the logging is so detailed and allows you to revist the map exactly as it was live at the time, so I make a great deal of use of that.

Yes I use the left foot to hold load sites, or to slow progress through load sites, and I also use hills to slow the cars progress through the rev range if its a powerful car (as otherwise if its something like my 500bhp or so nova its so quick through 3rd gear you dont have time to really see what is happening and in 4th gear you are repeatedly doing 130mph which isnt good for your license), not really an issue with an N/A car with only a couple of hundred bhp though as they are so slow to accelerate anyway.

If you get fast ford magazine from a couple of months ago I did a few pages in there on DIY mapping, will save me typing it all out again, lol

[sideways danny]

emerald is clunky. Not nice to use on the fly at all. Most other systems allow you to use a single key press. Omex uses plus and minus buttons, canems uses page up and down

I've cut and paste this from paddys ITB build thread. Canems is what I've chosen to use on mk1's and similar.... as it does everything you'll need without having dozens of unused features and at what I think is a decent price

This car has had the very first Canems ECU with the new software version (v2.10)



More control features


More accurate accel fuel control


and bigger main maps





I've had some new firmware specially written to allow use of the standard mk1 flywheel/trigger pattern


And it runs.....

[dkrevs]

@chip: So am I right thinking that with Emerald takes more time to map a car? In his book Dave says it takes somewhere around 3 hours to map a car or even more.
How much time do you usually need to adjust one cell, don't you "cook" your brakes in the meantime?
Do you use laptop/keyboard or do you use trim box/wheel?

If you get fast ford magazine from a couple of months ago I did a few pages in there on DIY mapping, will save me typing it all out again, lol

That would be great. Do you have it scanned or can you tell me where to get it?

@sideways danny: Yeah, I heard few good things about Canems already.
How do you map a car on the road Danny?

[Laine_16v]

Ktec fully mapped my car on Canems in just over 2.5 hours

[sideways danny]

I've been at Emerald when wobba had his car mapped, and had the conversation with them about how un user friendly the software is. They said a lot of people say the same but they dont really "get it". They have made several newer versions of the software but havn't released anything to the public yet.

Dave Walker maps his way and the software is designed around this. When you've learned another way you can't make it do what you want.

How long it takes depends on the car and spec really. It's aways a far faster process on the dyno though. We did a 172 from scratch in 1 hour 20 mins the night before FCS '09 and it remained with that map for over a year until it had some major changes made. 3 to 4 hours is about right for a customer car though.

[sideways danny]

oh, and i regard road mapping as a temporary measure only. it's "good enough" until you cn get on a dyno and do it right

[chip]

@chip: So am I right thinking that with Emerald takes more time to map a car?

Yes, its more cumbersome than most other ecu's so as a consequence it takes longer.

In his book Dave says it takes somewhere around 3 hours to map a car or even more.

Depends what you class as mapped TBH, an hour is normally enough for me to get an N/A car to be what most people would consider mapped, but you could spend 100 hours and still find more things to improve if you are using a fairly sophisticated ecu with good control over transient fuelling etc, not to mention there are temperature corrections to map accurately etc. Getting a car to drive nicely in one set of conditions is easily, getting it to drive perfectly in all conditions is anything but.
If you really want to do the job properly, the 3 hours dave mentioned would just about map the voltage compensation table perfectly for example, but most people arent going to care about that the way that a car manufacturer would for example.
A manufacturer spends literally thousands of hours working on a map, especially the backup tables.

So it really is impossible to give a "one size fits all" answer to that question.

But yes 3 hours is a reasonable ballpark on the rollers to get most of the map done pretty well though in most cases.

A lot of the time mappers spend far longer than that sorting out minor problems though with home built cars, if you have some wiring fault or sensor fault you can be paying for expensive rolling road time just to find that.

And it even catches those of us with a lot of experience out too. Once I spent about 40 mins of paid time on a set of rollers I rented fixing a water leak on my own car for example!

How much time do you usually need to adjust one cell, don't you "cook" your brakes in the meantime?

You dont typically hold a cell totally still on the road, just slow progress enough for you to see what is happening, the only time I spend a few seconds on one cell is when I am on the rollers.

Do you use laptop/keyboard or do you use trim box/wheel?

Laptop
You can only really use a trim box on the rollers and even then I see no real advantage over a laptop anyway, even emerald has a live adjustment screen you can use once you are held on a load site on the rollers.

If you get fast ford magazine from a couple of months ago I did a few pages in there on DIY mapping, will save me typing it all out again, lol

That would be great. Do you have it scanned or can you tell me where to get it?[/quote]

This issue:
http://www.fastfordmag.co.uk/2011/05...e-on-sale-now/

[chip]

oh, and i regard road mapping as a temporary measure only. it's "good enough" until you cn get on a dyno and do it right

Depends on the application, if you have a turbo car which is knock limited on ignition and EGT limited on AFR, the rollers are less useful, if you want to optimise the ignition on an N/A car though, or do the off load sites on a turbo car to the Nth degree then rollers are useful for that to.

I always do the final checks to the mapping on the road or track or runway though even after I have spent time on the rollers.
Rollers utterly cannot accurately replicate the way that the airflow characteristics of the engine change with roadspeed if you are talking 150mph pulls down the back straight at bedford like some of the cars I map are capable of, so the only way to know what the fuelling will really do in those circumstances is to do that speed and check, it can be quite surprising sometimes what happens to AFR's due to aerodynamics and road speed.
Ive mapped cars for example where the AFR gets a little leaner as speed increases to a point (you'd kind of expect this anyway due to "ram air" type effects) but then as the speed increases further it goes completely back the other way and goes very rich again, so it might be leaner in 3rd than 2nd, but then richer in 4th than it is in 3rd.

Depends what you are trying to achieve though, generally I am chasing 95% of the available power but with a nice big margin of safety as it tends to be trackday or road cars I am mapping, where as if its a competition car chasing the last few bhp can by far the most important factor.
Also with car type too, on an N/A car safety isnt generally much of an issue, the most powerful tune is normally a very safe one anyway, so its more on big boost turbo cars that I am talking about where I will dial in extra safety at the expense of power.

[dkrevs]

^^Thanks.

New question. Can car with ITBs be mapped with MAP sensor as main load sensor? Ofcourse with hoses from every runner attached with T pieces together to one main hose which would go to MAP sensor. Is this possible and if it is, is it better than Alpha-N mode?