How to Tune Holley Terminator X for Beginners. Part 1

in this video i'm going to try and give you a quick but thorough rundown of the holley terminator x software so you just got your terminator x installed you're ready to start messing with it but nobody reads instruction manuals and you don't feel like sitting through 124 hours of youtube videos you're going to go through this as quick as possible with the assumption that you have at least a little bit of electronic fuel injection experience even if not you're starting from scratch you're a true beginner you can still pick some things up from this and most importantly if you have any other questions on any of these tabs or any of these settings that you would like me to go deeper into just comment below and then we can make separate videos on all of them all right let's jump into it all right first things first and probably worth mentioning here at the beginning is the little three and a half inch display works great as a display or maybe if you want to make a little change here and there but i do not advise using that to actually tune the vehicle and i also do not advise using that to set up your base calibration to start the car and all that stuff for the first time maybe starting it isn't such a bad thing but i find it to be far more difficult than doing it through the software and the other thing is the base calibrations that those things build are generally extremely extremely aggressive and dangerous just take that into consideration when you're getting started alright you have your software open the first thing we need to do is start a new tune file if you're not familiar with holley's terminology they call what's usually referred to as like a calibration file or a tune or tune file they call it a global file so since we're starting from scratch it would make the most sense to click on create new global file right absolutely not so if we do that everything is zeroed out just zeros basically for for all of it uh which isn't what we want so close that out go back to file and then just click on open global file this base house is where you can find something that's going to be pretty close and it gives you this warning that you're about to blow your life apart so just click ok that sounds good so click on gm ls based so then you can just click on whichever setup appears to be the closest to what you have i'll usually this 24x and 58x is the crank trigger so i'll usually try and start with something that uses the same crank trigger as the engine that i'm actually tuning if you have if you do a bunch of these you're probably already more than aware that you you don't have to start with these files you can start with another file that you've previously used but for the sake of this video we're going to assume that this is your first time so we'll click on this turbo 24x all right now that we have our file open these icons up here are the main like sections so the fuel injectors the fuel tab spark plugs a spark tab so on and so forth if you go up here to toolbox you can go to preferences most of this stuff's useless but this checkbox right here for display map is psi helps a lot of people out otherwise it's in kpa which most people aren't familiar with so make sure that's clicked if you want to use psi the system icf is usually where you start out icf is an acronym for something stupid i think it's like internal configuration file it's kind of meaningless but so basically click on system icf and this is where we'll start and then i work at the top work my way down for ecu configuration make sure you choose whichever one of the two ecu's you're using engine parameters this stuff's all pretty self-explanatory as far as you need to enter your engine size the number of cylinders the type of fuel you're using here for fuel type if you're going to use flex fuel click on gasoline and only use e85 if you're only going to run e85 even then i still just use gasoline you only have one choice for an o2 sensor fuel pressure uh this fuel pump prime you can use this uh if you want to i think that's the max like if you want to drain your fuel pump you can just temporarily change that so it'll run for a really long time multi-port basically means you have an injector per cylinder the biggest decision that you're going to have to make while tuning all of these is here in load sensing basically speed density typically would just be if you're using a map sensor but with holley speed density will the fuel table will use pounds per hour as the table values so if you're familiar with pounds per hour that's what you would want to use alpha n is just typically for individual throttle body cars or maybe something with an obnoxious cam shaft if you're using terminator actually probably not going to use that i've never used either one of these combos but the one that i prefer to use is ve based because now we're using volumetric efficiency for all of the fueling calculations which makes life way easier i hear on the fuel injector information this is the primary place where i see people just freak the hell out and not know what to do and you just click on they have this big drop down menu for all kinds of different injectors so if you click on it you can you can see that the dead times and stuff change so if your injectors are on this list obviously it's very easy click on them and you're done if they're not on this list just simply go down to custom enter your fuel injector so what size they are so if they're 80 pound injectors at 60 pounds of pressure then enter 80. in this minimum injector opening time if so first of all if you bought fuel injectors that are worth owning they will give you all of this information you'll just have to enter it manually so like let's just say we have a 1.1 minimum opening time 80 pounds 60 pounds of pressure and then now all we have to do is enter in what these injector off time is at each given battery voltage so like if yours is 0.88 right here instead of whatever the hell it was before i changed it then just enter it to that and then fill this out now if you just simply do not have injector data for whatever reason if you select a set of injectors that is pretty close the car is going to run you might just need to modify this a little bit and this is another part where like if you're in your fuel table and rather than being 40 50 percent va at idle like let's say you're at 25 or 80 then you know your injector information is not correct so in which case you can just modify these numbers and then this minimum injector opening time is usually specified by the fuel injector company i've never run into this problem but i've seen others have it but like let's say your car idle's at 1.4 milliseconds but at 1.2 milliseconds the car just freaks out and shuts off then you know that you can set this to 1.3 milliseconds and i'll never go below that so the way you would run into this is if your fueling table you're idling here with these values it's it you know that 1.4 if you have an offset for whatever reason whether it's excel enrichment or temperature enrichment these numbers could add or subtract from your table value and get you into a situation where you're running a different pulse width than what you wanted to so basically that's just like a ceiling or i guess a floor rather so that the pulse width can't go below that value ignition parameters this ignition type right here is the car will not run if you don't get this correct so they make it pretty simple they have drop down for a majority of stuff so if you have a 24 tooth crank trigger you just use that knock sensors the single wire knock sensors aren't my favorite so kind of pick and choose if you want to use those but basically if you're not going to use any knock sensors choose zero and if you are going to use knock sensors obviously choose the amount that you have and then you'd have to set all of this stuff up if you are planning on using knock sensors that's a little more in depth than what this video needs to cover so you have basic ios here which is inputs and outputs i don't like the way holly has their inputs and outputs in multiple different places so you have an input output tab here and then another one here for your pin map and it's kind of a little bit redundant and annoying basically again if you just read it's pretty self-explanatory if you have two fans when they turn on when they turn off and then you can turn them off with ac tcc is your torque converter and then the staging here would be for like your bump box this closed loop and learn tab gets a lot of people into a lot of trouble as most of the default values or everything is set to 100 so basically like if you have a o2 sensor go bad and it fails all the way richer all the way lean the computer is going to continuously try to add 50 plus 50 percent so you can get to a situation in the car won't even start anymore i personally never use the learn feature i don't like it and i'll typically set my closed loop really low like maybe plus or minus 10 and this is a situational thing some cars some scenarios uh you might you know up this or down this there's some cars some setups that i won't use closed loop at all but that's kind of a make that decision in the heat of the moment type of thing individual cylinder corrections are pretty straightforward in this sense like if you just wanted to add five percent of fuel to cylinder number four that's all you do but this would be adding five percent of solar number four all of the time if you click on use tables here you can pick your cylinder and then you can use whatever access you want to to do it so scaling on this one's a little bit weird but let's say just from here there so at 15 pounds and 14 and a half pounds and higher we're adding the five percent but this way we're not adding the five percent when we're just cruising around and of course here's and yet another input output tab so after you've set up this is like the main primary setup once you get done with that you can go over to sensors and just choose whichever sensors you're running so maps manifold pressure cts coolant temperature mats manifold air temperature oil pressure fuel pressure so those are all pretty straightforward you can do custom sensors you would just need to enter the sensor data in here the fuel tab is where you're going to spend the bulk of your time tuning and you can view so this is volume volumetric efficiency so we're basically working on a scale of i don't know maybe 40 to 120 typically if this was in pounds per hour you these numbers would be much higher and there'd be a much bigger difference but here the scale is pretty small and you can immediately look you immediately look at a ve table and tell if the if it's tuned properly or not as you can see here the higher boost levels we're ramping up to about 110 ve and you know depending on on how high this car wants to make power you know these numbers might taper down just a little bit at higher rpm but looks pretty normal and then you can view it graphically like this another thing a lot of people don't know if you use the arrow keys on the keyboard you can move this little dot around and then if you hold ctrl and then hit plus or minus you can make your adjustments this way i pretty much make all of my adjustments in this 3d table rather than this numerical table i like to be able to see what i'm doing graphically and then another thing that you can do with this table is there's the smooth button right here which i don't recommend ever pushing that even though it's tempting so if you don't have anything highlighted and you you click on smooth it'll smooth all of it but if you highlight a certain area and click smooth then it will just smooth that area but either way don't push that one they should call this the lazy button and the get yourself into trouble button so a lot of times this smooth feature will override everything that you've just done and i've actually done an entire video just on that subject next we have air fuel ratio if you go up here to type you can pick simple which basically eliminates this table and now you just set your idle your cruise and your wide open throttle i don't recommend doing that just go to 2d and you can make this as simple as complicated as you want like you can just go 14 point whatever you want it to be and then just say everything positive manifold pressure you want it to be 12-0 and you can make it that simple another thing you can do is if you make that that value so if we highlight all of this then we right-click you can fill row values or fill column values basically the row values are going to be a horizontal interpolation and then fill column values is going to be vertical so if we go with that then you can see it now it's going to taper from this 12o to this 110 so get used to using those features you'll use them non-stop i do wish there was hotkeys for them which now that i say that i should probably dig through the hotkey menu and make sure that there isn't but a lot of other ecu's you use like h for horizontal v for vertical or something like that that's way easier than right clicking especially when you're driving around a car and bouncing around this acceleration enrichment is probably one of the more complicated things to wrap your head around if you're new to this so there's a whole bunch of different changes that you can make generally speaking the default values and these tables are pretty close but if you open the throttle real quick and it stumbles it's real lean and real rich this is where you would make those changes and one i didn't even necessarily understand what they were talking about when i first read it is ae versus map rsc blanking so basically this is a sensitivity so if you have a really large throttle body that seems to be overly sensitive and jumping into the enrichment when you don't want to you can you know move this number up or down and then obviously tps is for when the throttle changes rapidly and then map is for when the manifold pressure changes rapidly and then you can do it over cooling temperature this whole section here i'm sure people want to see a video on it and we can go into more depth on all of it there so here's your temperature enrichments so as the engine is cold it will require more fuel to maintain the same air fuel ratio so you can see that these values taper off once you get up to these warmer values everything goes to zero so basically 100 is zero correction or zero enrichment rather then we have air fuel ratio offset so you would pull away fuel at colder temperatures to run a richer air fuel ratio and then last in this one we have the air temperature enrichment this is more of like a mathematical you need this much more fuel this temperature this much less fuel at this temperature to maintain the same air fuel ratio what you can do here though is if you know you're not running methanol and you're on gasoline and your intercooler is terrible you can if you want to try and keep the motor alive you can just throw some fuel in it like this obviously uh 200 fuel is excessive and just kind of moving around so you can see then here's all your startup enrichment stuff so during cranking which is usually you know maybe four or 500 rpm this would be the amount of additional fuel that was added in pounds per hour this is the after start and then basically we're going to taper this off over a given period of time and then here's the decay rate in which it does so and then fuel control is just your decel fuel cut so basically all this is going to do is turn the injectors off if you enable it as long as you you meet all the criteria here it seems for whatever reason with holly that most of these files have everything turned off but you can improve some fuel economy and not let your parachutes and stuff on fire shoot fireballs if you enable this and properly set it up alright so next up we have idle and i'm gonna go through this one really quick because this will probably be the next video that i do as this is the thing that i get asked about the most but to go through it real quick idle spark is what's gonna adjust your ignition timing based off of the difference of your target idle and the actual idle i'll use this on mild camshaft sometimes but usually there isn't enough adjustability within this so i'll usually build a custom table or two to offset timing different ways based off of the way i want it to behave um you need to set your idle control type uh the gm stuff's usually the stepper and then like the ford and the hondas are usually pwm and this ramp down is basically how it's going to return to idle and the startup is how long it's going to hold and and how long it's going to ramp out of this table here which is ic parked basically when you shut the car off this is where the idle control valve will the position that it will go to so in this case when it's negative 40 degrees outside it's going to be all the way open and so this is obviously changed off coolant temperature in your position up here basically you can think of this as the equivalent holding your foot on the throttle and of course we have another inputs and outputs tab the idle control within the holley software probably is the worst part of it it just doesn't allow for enough control but the good news is it works well enough that you can make it work and it's not overly complicated some other systems you could you know jump through what feels like 50 different tables just for idle control so if you have a good understanding of how it all works it works out pretty well but it can be very tedious very time consuming and if you don't know what you're looking at a lot of times you end up doing more harm than good next up is the spark tab it's basically all the same as the fuel tap so you have your base table your graph everything you can move it all around the same and view everything the same way the same thing if you move the little dot around you can use the control plus or minus to move all of the you know move the dot up or down cranking this is basically how much timing it's going to run while you're cranking the engine over so basically anything below 400 rpm is considered cranking anything after is considered running uh here's your rev limiters you have different rev limiter types this rev limiter one you think would be labeled a little differently but this is basically your two step so you can enable that or disable it launch so if you enable this basically usually done off time off of trans brake input so you can pull timing you know for a given amount of time you can sort of think of this as traction control the esc parameters are knock so again if you're not using not control just zero this table out and just like the fuel correction stuff based off coolant temperature and air temperature you have the same thing here with timing and what would you know another inputs tab so next up is this input output inputs and outputs tab this is where you would actually set up and configure whatever it is that you're trying to do it's a little too in-depth for this video this one i'm just trying to get you up and running boost control is without a doubt the most complex thing within all of this where most people are going to struggle i set up everything with all of the holley systems either as a dome control with co2 where you would use your pid settings and all that good stuff i'm not trying to boost off the time whenever i can almost everything has a trans brake so that makes sense if you're not comfortable with all this pid settings and co2 and all that good stuff if you actually go into the input output and outputs i just have it labeled kaboom for because i'm an idiot you go to configure and then pwm setup again you can set your all of your access here however you want so let's say above 60 throttle and basically this manifold pressure we can just put like 70 so then you're going to run like 70 duty cycle to a solenoid and you know you can maybe start at 30 or 40 percent make a run see how much boost it makes and then bump that up in five or ten percent increments and then figure out you know let's say just say for the same conversation at 70 percent duty cycle equals 15 pounds of manifold pressure then that's the easiest way to do all that i have seen and heard of guys running an additional input and then tapping into the fact you know whatever map sense are you using to run some half ass like close boost control that way i don't really like doing it like that uh next up is transmission for you'd have to have an xmax ecu to do this and then it can control some different transmissions again a video for another day this here is a compare feature which i don't like the way that they've laid it out in here but if you open up two files you can see the differences between the two and you can do some copy pasting type stuff i use that feature quite a bit in some other programs i don't really use it much in holly pin map this is basically just where you're wiring all your stuff and everything's like drag and drop this little clipboard i'm not connected to an ecu so it won't work but this is how you enable your data logging and there's some different stuff here within the sync ecu that's where you do your tps auto set which you'll need to do before you can start the car for the first time this here opens up your little gauge panel if you right click on stuff you can make changes again i'm not live with the computer so i can't do anything it opens it in a separate tab which i find to be super annoying so i never use that and then this toggle strip is kind of like a real-time data logger so rather than seeing numerical values like in these screens it'll just plot things out which can be helpful for setting up certain things and probably the last thing we need to know in here is you can toggle on all of these so this engine was running it would show all of these different values would be populated with what's actually happening and if you click on this little e you can drag and drop like say if we wanted view number 10 we can put our closed loop status our pulse width rpm so on and so forth and then it will it'll pop up and then you can basically this way you can view whatever it is you want to view however you want to view it and they're pretty helpful again i wish they were a little more customizable but they do what you need them to do all right that's going to do it for this video if there's anything else that you'd like to see explained in detail let me know and i can make more videos on all the different settings and tables and parameters and all that good stuff if you haven't already make sure you subscribe and i'll see you on the next [Music] video you

Channel: Joe Simpson

Views: 134,224

Keywords:

Id: Jpjlq5u4RE0

Length: 25min 2sec (1502 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020