How to Tune Holley Terminator X for Beginners - IDLE CONTROL TARGETS // Holley EFI Idle Tuning

[Music] what's up everybody welcome back what's up in this video we're going to do a quick run through on the idle control and the holley terminator x software this will all apply to the hp and dominator as well and some of the other models but we're going to be using terminator x and this car in the background we'll do some example stuff that car is a little bit of a worst case scenario it very well may never run correctly but that's a story for a different day rather than showing you like the values that you're going to use to make this work i'm going to show you how and why and what the tables themselves do and then based off of that information you should be able to make the adjustments to make the car idle well all right we'll start by just opening up a random file just some of this crap highly gives you to start with this little tachometer looking gauge thing here is your idle control and then here's all the different stuff that we have to adjust so first and foremost before you can really dial in this idle control you need all of your fueling and the car needs to run really well first now with that being said you can't have 30 percent learn and 30 closed loop correction going on and expect everything to work properly but if you're not sure like what i mean by if if your fueling and stuff is set up properly the easiest thing to do is just go into here and actually disable your closed loop and disable the learn if the car starts and runs and the air fuel is close to where you want it to be then you should be ready to start adjusting the idle another thing that i found is very helpful is start adjusting the idle with the car warm and get the car idling really good when it's warm before you go back and then try and adjust the cold start cold start is a lot more difficult to get correct but the car spends far more of its time when it's warmed up so get this warm stuff good and then you know that's right and then you can correct the startup if we go back here into the idle tabs the iac settings is where i'd recommend starting as far as iec control just pick whichever one you're using you can use gm lsx or 5.0 ford or the two most common ones obviously the drive by wire you'd select that or whatever else you're using the slow the medium and the fast are worth playing with if you can't get any of this other stuff to work but basically all of these are pre-programming this custom tab which would allow you to set up all of your own pid control if you're watching a how to tune holley terminator x for a beginner's video then this probably isn't the way that you want to go about it so just choose whichever idle control that you're currently using and that's going to most likely do what you need it to do once you've selected that you can go here to iec type the stepper is like a an ls pwm is like a ford drive by wire is obviously just that and then you can select none if you're not using an idle control valve now something i do have to stop and say as i come across this pretty frequently is you have to have an idle air control valve on the engine in order for any of the stuff to work without idle air control valve none of it will work with the exception of the idle spark tab right here but none of this other stuff will so once you've set up the idler control type then i would go over here to idle speed and it doesn't matter if it's your grandma's 89 buick or if it's your rich neighbor's 2020 lamborghini every fuel-injected car out there is going to start with a higher rpm as the coolant temperature is cold and then progressively come down to where your idle is going to be once the vehicle is warm these temperature ranges are going to be different depending on where you live the time of the year and then what type of car as to where one car might be considered fully warmed up at 160 degrees and the next one might not be fully warmed up until 2 40. these are all personal preference and a matter of the car with the cars you know it's a bone stock 92 honda civic like you might be able to idle it at 600 rpm and it might only need 800 rpm when it's cold as to where if it's pretty much aggressive it might have to idle at a thousand rpm warmed up and it might need idle at 1 500 rpm when it's cold you're just gonna have to play with these numbers and generally i try to make all of these just as low as they can be and then still have the engine be happy now if you're not familiar with what the idle air control valve does the name makes part of it self-explanatory is it controls the idle but how it does that is it's actually an air bleed so the easiest way to think about it is it's going to bypass air free throttle body post throttle body which is going to make the idle increase so if that doesn't make sense to you it's the electronic equivalent of you putting your foot on the gas pedal just a little bit and cracking the idle blade open and it's just going to allow more airflow through which is going to bring up the torque more torque it means higher idle so in some situations when the engine is very modified you might have to actually adjust the throttle stop on the throttle body to mechanically crack the throttle blade at which point is going to be your zero point so if your idle air control valve has to operate at 100 opening and it's still not idly high enough if you crack the throttle blade with the throttle stop now you can bring the idle control valve duty cycle down and really you want to try and get the idle duty cycle to work as low as little as possible if the thing requires zero to 100 degree swings it takes time to do that and all the pid control everything's just going to be going crazy so you want the idle control to just do a little bit of work in which case i'll set the throttle to where it's just a little bit below what my target idle is when the engine's warmed up so let's say my title target idle is 800 rpm with the idle control disabled i might set the the throttle body to 770 rpm or 750 rpm again all of this is going to change per car per modifications but you need to set that zero point so after you adjust the throttle body and reset that that stop you're going to need to recalibrate the throttle position sensor because in order for the idle control to work the throttle position sensor needs to know where zero percent throttle is and if you don't do the auto set then once you crack that throttle body open the tps sensor is now going to read you know depending on how much you change it might read five or six percent so it may never actually enter the idle control you understand what i'm saying all right now that we've set up our idle control type we've set our idle speed the iec parked is going to be the next thing that we're going to look at with the iac parked is during cranking as you're cranking the key this is going to be the value that it's going to hold the idle air control valve at just like most of the other idle tables this is done off coolant temperature when it's really cold outside you'll see it's 100 so basically you're trying to allow as much airflow to pass through as possible and then as the engine warms up you don't need quite as much so if you start the engine and the rpm flares really high higher than you want it to then you would bring these numbers down and then if you're cranking and you gotta hold your foot on the throttle in order to get it to fire up then you would need to bring these values up now with that being said this is with the assumption that all of your startup fueling stuff is correct and you just need more airflow so this is how you would bring up airflow but this will not correct poor fueling all right so if we go back in here to our iec settings this idle spark is just that we'll actually adjust the ignition timing to make up and absorb differences in your idle control the idle control valve itself actually takes time there is a mechanical delay between it opening and closing as is where the ignition timing is instantaneous the p term and the d term are basically how fast it's going to react the higher you go with this number the faster it's going to to spike the timing up and down and the lower it is the more it's going to be gradual so you can just play with that a little bit and then the d term is kind of like the brakes so it doesn't try to the p is going to try and get the timing to go in the direction it wants to go as fast as it can and then the d is going to try and slow it down once it starts getting close to where you want it to be again there's it's a whole nother video but that's what that does enabling the idle spark does make a pretty big difference and uh just simply raise or lower these values and see if it changes the idle the way you want it to be i find that you can go pretty high on these and the difference is pretty minimal a lot of times i actually turn this off and i'll build a custom table to make everything do what i want it to do the way i want it to do but you guessed it that's another video all right so next in here we have the startup iac position so basically once we get past this ic park position you get through your cranking rpm and you get into what would be considered the engine running now we are going to enter into the startup iec position so what our startup iec position is going to do is hold the the idle at a higher position for this much time uh so it would clearly in this example here it would hold it for four seconds and then after that we would go into the decay time which is how long it's going to start ramping it down if you increase this number that ramp will take longer you know obviously in this case it'll take four seconds before it gets out of the startup iac position and just goes to normal idle control and if you were to put this at one second then you know it would ramp down much faster now i think the easiest way to kind of describe how all of this is going to work is going to be to draw it out no some people can just be the hardest so basically we're going to turn our key on and we're going to start cranking the engine at that point we're going to be whatever our coolant temperature is at that point in time is going to be our iec parked position so we can draw that out like this and pretend that's straight once we've exited cranking we go into our startup ic position so we're going to hold that for four seconds and then we're going to decay it for four seconds so at that point we're gonna progressively bring this down like this and then now once we get past that we're gonna maintain our target idle which would be like your standard idle control so let's say for sake of conversation it starts up really good it ramps down exactly the way that we want and then it maintains an idle so now once we've gotten past all of that these these settings are the the primary ones that you're going to play with that's going to dictate how the car returns back down to an idle so the iac hold position is let's say our idle control is operating as normal at zero percent throttle once you give it throttle and you start driving and holding and maintaining the throttle position over zero the idle control valve is going to go to this iec hold position which in this case is 40 let's say it's going to take 20 percent to maintain our normal idle when we're stationary so now either when we're moving or free revving the engine and we get off past that zero percent throttle so we can get out of the idle control now we're going to go to the iec hold position so basically the whole time we're driving around we're going to go from this point and it's it ramps up pretty quick and then it's going to hold 40 percent this ramp value is basically irrelevant i don't think it's adjustable because your foot you're going to be opening the throttle enough to where the idle control valve isn't going to make a difference basically what we're trying to do here is we want it to be open a certain amount so when we close the throttle the idle control valve is is open and that way we can gradually control how we're going to bring that back down to idle all right so we're driving we're at 3000 rpm cruising we let off of the throttle completely what's going to happen now is the engine rpms are going to fall very quickly as fast as you know the engine will allow that to happen and that's where we're going to get into this rpm above idle to start ramp so even though we've let off of the throttle we're going to maintain this forty percent hold value until we get to this value right here which is a thousand uh whatever we set this to but in this case it's a thousand rpm above whatever the type target idle is so if we say we're here at 700 rpm at this temperature then we would be at 1700 rpm so now once our engine gets to 1700 rpm then the idle control valve is going to slowly start to cane out for this amount of time in this case obviously that's five seconds and then once we get past that point once it gets down to again it's in this case it's 50 50 engine rpm above whatever our target idle is so it was what 700 so once we get to 750 engine rpm then now the idle is going to go back to our our standard our main idle control as if the car was stationary so basically what we're trying to do with all of this is gradually bring the engine rpm down to where it catches nice and smooth and basically like the objective is is to where you can't tell any of the stuff's going on that the energy comes down and goes right back to a nice idle i do think that there needs to be more adjustability than what's currently here but if you spend some time with it just about every time i've been able to get this to work the two things that i really wish that it had which there's other ways that you can kind of manipulate it but there's no just right out of the box there's no gear detection so it doesn't know the difference whether i'm in parker neutral or if the car is in gear and depending on the torque converter that's in the car you can make it idle like a million dollars in parking neutral but then you put into gear and the engine shuts off in which case you got to do all your idle control stuff in gear so that's one problem and then the other problem is it doesn't have speed as an option here because sometimes if you're just free revving in neutral these values might work really good but once you get driving down the road and you're going 60 miles an hour or 160 miles an hour like you might want some different offsets based off of that so i wish that stuff was built into just the standard idle control but unfortunately it's not so if we go back to our drawing here i forget where i left off let's start over of course somebody's up god damn door zero percent i gotta can't do this with that thing in the background god damn it [Music] all right so we're gonna start here our cranking start up is it we're gonna say we're at fifty percent so we're at 50 as seen here and then we're going to hold that for four seconds and then we're going to slowly ramp it out for four seconds so we're going to say that's where we're cranking so we're gonna hold this here for four seconds and then we're gonna slowly decay this for four seconds and then at that point we're going to go to what we would consider our normal standard idle all right so that's how all of our startup in maintaining a normal idle is all going to work so now we're going to get into once we start driving so again our normal we're just sitting here idling our standard idle now we're going to start driving and our idle position is going to jump up to this value which is 40 so we're up here and now we're just going to cruise at 40 percent so now we're going to let off of the throttle completely until we get zero percent throttle position and now a thousand rpm above idle which is 700 rpm so at 1700 rpm we're going to begin this decay so we let off the throttle here we're going to maintain that 40 percent until we get to 1700 engine rpm somebody else is here you got to be kidding me all right so we got a normal idle position we're at zero percent throttle so let's call this twenty percent once we start driving we exit idle control mode this is going to jump up to our 40 percent and hold which is this value right here now once we let off of the throttle close the throttle throttle blade all together a thousand rpm above our target idle so 1700 rpm the idle is now going to begin dropping from 40 over the course of five seconds until we get to 50 rpm above the target idle so in this case that's going to be 750 rpm at 1700 rpm this value is going to slowly start creeping down like this and then once it gets to 750 rpm which is 50 percent above our target idle it's going to do what it needs to do to get back to this value so theoretically it would would be like that and you'll see uh sometimes they'll jump down and jump up and they'll do some stuff but the more of this you can take out of the equation usually the better it's going to run and you would do that by adjusting the hold value the decay rate and then the rpm above idle to go back into normal idle control and then also so basically all of these values um you just have to play with them and if you go too aggressive on these it's going to kind of have like a cruise control effect all right i'm trying this one last time now so what you can do is you can change this iec hold position you can actually change your idle speed to let's say like 1500 rpm just whatever and actually try and make it idle at 1 500 rpm just at a dead stop and then look at your data log and see what the actual idle position is and then you can use that as a reference point to set this value um or in this in case of this example i guess it would be 1700 rpm so you go to 1700 rpm see what the idle air control valve position is and then you can use that value right here but you have to play with all these values there is no one size fits all and there really is no right or wrong way to do it just as long as the car idles the way that you want it to be you're good now if you adjust this ramp down right here that is going to change this slope here so if you slope it down real fast you're going to have less of like that cruise control effect but the idle is going to be more likely to dip and go below where you want it to be now if you go too long like this then you're trying to slow down and the car won't actually slow down because again it's going to act as if the throttle is open so you want to find that like happy medium and then where you're returning to idle like oops that's not very straight this right here is really what getting this to where you're happy with it is really going to be like where you're going to spend a majority of your tinkering i'm a gangster all right because of all the interruptions that didn't go as planned at all but let's actually try moving around some of these numbers in a car and you can see it in a data log and it should theoretically make a little bit more sense then okay i don't know anything about this tune or this car really it just got here this is just what was in it this car is a little bit rough around the edges i don't know how well it runs but again i'm not necessarily showing you what values to use to make it run correctly i'm showing you like what each thing does and what the target is doing we'll move some of these values around and see what's going to happen so we're going to start with just a cold start forget it's got some weird button to start it and basically it doesn't start just to get this going let's see if we can't just bump this up a little bit so i'm nothing else you can see that raising the iac parks position gave it enough airflow to actually fire up and now it's just gonna progressively uh drop down so what i'm gonna do is just shut this off until it's warmed up all right so if we look at this log we can see here when it wouldn't fire the ic position was holding at 73 percent uh here's the rpm where it just didn't want to do anything here we raised it to 100 and then you can see now it finally fired up and then it held at that position uh for our given period of time here which was four seconds then it began to decay which is right here i don't do drugs when i'm about to start just don't have to deal with this anymore and then after it decays you can see all this jaggedness is the actual pid control so this is basically our our base idle control and the rpm is still here pretty high so this would probably progressively come down as it warms up and the idle lowers down so now the engine's warmed up let's move around come with these some of these settings and [Music] somebody kill me please make some drastic changes to these settings so we can kind of see the difference all right let's just double everything all right so now we're at a colder position we're only at 50 and then you can see once the engine fired up how much longer it held that 50 uh and then the ramp down is longer as well and then unfortunately since it's not tuned everything has to increase usually or generally speaking your all of your startup and your base is going to be higher than the actual standard idle control all right now we'll start up we'll rev it a little bit and we'll start paying attention to this stuff it sounds garbage we'll turn the spark idle control on and off too just so you can see the difference there so now you can see we in our normal idle control here we rev it up it exits idle control and it's just holding the iac for a fixed value i have the target idle at a thousand rpm and then the ramp down begins a thousand rpm above that so you can see once you get here to 2000 rpm you can see that this starts tapering down then we get to 1050 which is 50 rpm above our target of a thousand you can see it ramps back in and it starts going into normal idle control mode again now if you look here this straight line is our ignition timing which is 28 degrees and then the base timing is 28 degrees and then you can see here when the the timing idle is enabled you can see all of this jagged is the the pid control trying to to stabilize the idle again here's where it's off here's where it's on and again i haven't tuned this or done anything with this and if you look at the the base timing they just they're using the simple with a fixed 28 degrees and then all the modifiers are zero so that's why it's just a flat flat number all right now let's move some of these numbers around pretty drastically and see the difference let's just double everything and we'll try this actually since the starter on this thing's so ridiculous let's let's bump this down a little bit see if that helps any let's see what happens [Music] see how much quicker it starts lowering that rpm the cranking rpm so if we look at this now you can see how much more jagged the timing is going as a result of changing those pid values but the main thing i'm more concerned with here so here's our normal idle control here's the iac position as it's increasing up to our now 80 percent hold value so now you can see that we're holding at our 80 percent and now our drop down here is much slower and we went from 50 to 100 rpm above before it starts our normal idle control and then it jumps right back right back in and it's holding standard idle control is about 60 which is way too much so gonna make some adjustments at the throttle body but ultimately this right here we're gonna try and get to avoid this dip right here all right guys that's gonna do it for this what started off as a really basic uh quick video turn in a little bit more of that sorry it's a little all over the place with all the interruptions but that's what i deal with every day now if there's any aspects of this that you want to see further just comment below let me know what you want to see and i'd like to do a video is actually setting one up and making it idle properly and again this one is just kind of to show you how it all works and what the targets are doing you really need to understand what the targets are doing before you can make the actual engine rpm and the idle control and everything do what you want it to do so target is the most important part as far as understanding how it works the rest of it's just moving numbers around until the two things match each other so like always thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video i'm gonna get rid of all this god damn it

Channel: Joe Simpson

Views: 75,763

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Id: e2URkcNVzBM

Length: 26min 36sec (1596 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021