What You Didn't know about IDLE CONTROL with Holley EFI!

but if we flip this switch before we look at some examples let's just real quick talk about kind of what the IC valve is and what it's capable of so at the end of the day all of the idle control valve is is a controlled vacuum leak it's a valve that opens and closes based off of how you program it but the big takeaway and what you need to keep in mind is that with the idle control valve all the way closed there's no air going through it and with the idle control valve all the way open that is as much air as that valve can flow in a lot of instances I think a lot of you are looking for the idle control valve to do way more than what it's actually capable of so in this video I'm going to kind of show you some of the differences by using an engine simulator to take the actual running engine out of the equation it's going to make it a lot easier to sort of paint the picture on how this works then we'll do a couple examples on a running car obviously I can't go over every setting and every detail in one YouTube video so if I'm going a little too quick for you or you'd like to see some of these settings broken down a little bit further if you click on the link in the description below I can email you a PDF where I've broken down a lot of this stuff a lot further oh we gotta slow it down let's take a look at kind of some of these options and take a look at how the idle control is actually working and hopefully it will allow you to wrap your head around what's actually going on and what's possible what's not and how to look at the data and figure out what you need to change in order to get your car to idle the way that you want all right I'm going to be using Terminator X for this as that's what I have connected to the simulator the HP Dominator software is nearly identical and the sniper software is basically the same except we have a couple of less options actually makes a little bit easier so we're going to take a look at IAC parked in an actual running car basically that leaves us this IEC settings tab to play with here on the simulator so the very first thing that we need to do is we need to set up our data monitor so that we can actually keep an eye on what's Happening so we know what to change so if you click on this little e here we're just going to drag some of these channels over so that we can see all the data real time now I'm going to make the assumption that your fueling and stuff has already taken care of if you wanted to keep an eye and coolant temperature oil pressure any of the health type stuff you can obviously drop that into this but for this example I'm just putting the idle related stuff that you absolutely have to take a look at so we're going to want TPS RPM Target idle speed IAC position and ignition timing and if you want you can also put base timing on here so the base timing is what's in the ignition table and then the ignition timing is what's actually happening and if you're using the spark based idle control you'll see that these numbers are going to change so that's the easiest way to see how much is changing now that we have all these channels on here the last thing we want to do is give this a name since this is all of our idle control stuff only one name makes sense now you can see over here on the left we can take a look at all those channels that we just dropped into that monitor so the first thing that you need to do is choose an idle speed that's going to work for the car the engine the cam the combo and all that good stuff and you're better off starting high and working your way down and if you go and get in your grandma's Toyota Camry or any modern car you're going to notice that the cars are going to idle higher when the coolant temperature is cold so you might want to do something along the lines of this and say we'll call 180 degrees warmed up you can feel real value so you'll see that it will taper off with coolant temperature but for this example we'll just set everything in a fixed 1000 RPM it'll make it easier to see some of the other demonstrations stuff so we'll start here with idle spark I usually turn this off when I'm first tuning the engine and once I have everything idling the way that I want then I'll re-enable it my process on how I do idle control will kind of change car to car because some cars are really difficult to get the idle the way that you want and other ones are nice and simple so we'll leave this enabled since I'm about to show you how this works and we'll go to the ignition table and you can see the whole thing is just set to 20 again just for demonstrative purposes so you can see how this idle control timing works all right first thing that you're going to notice here is our base timing is 20 like I said that's what's in the table and then our ignition timing is 12. so those don't match if we turn off this idle Spark goes right back to 20. I didn't see that coming so obviously this idle spark is why that timing is being removed and if you look at our Target idle speed and then our actual engine RPM the engine RPM is higher so it's trying to pull timing to bring the speed down now the next thing you need to notice here is that our TPS is at zero percent so watch what happens if we increase the TPS and two is the magic number here so it's one no change two now everything's jumping around and once it go above two you can see our idle spark has now disabled itself so now our actual ignition timing is matching our base timing again so bring our TPS back down now you can see we have a eight degree difference here so now watch what happens when we go below our Target idle speed now you see that we just went eight degrees in the opposite direction so basically our idle spark has a plus or minus of eight degrees and changing these P and D terms does not change that eight degree swing it just changes kind of the rate in which the timing is added and subtracted and we go into this stuff in much more detail in my course we have basically a video on each one of these settings so if you wanted to simplify this for yourself just to get the understanding of it you can basically put the D term at zero or match what you're doing with the p term so that was a p term of 40. watch what happens if we do a p term of one now you can see how much slower the ignition timing is moving and basically it's directly proportional to how far away from the Target that we are so if we change this to 80 without the RPM moving you can see it shot all the way to our Max of eight degrees if we go to two three four so you can see how changing that number again it's going to dictate how fast or how slow it adds or removes ignition timing based off of the amount of air that there is and if we go to I don't say 60 on the P term we do the same thing with the D term because one no change five no change 50. 100 so you can see what the D term does is nowhere near as aggressive as what the P term does the p term is the star of the show here so don't be afraid to move this number around and see how the car reacts you can do this all right if you have over here too IAC control here's a big one where a lot of people are afraid to experiment and you're really just shooting yourself in the foot by doing that so we want to set our ISD type to whatever it is that we're actually using and you actually see that there's an option here for none it's just great for Diagnostic purposes if you're ever having idle control issues just turn the idle control valve off or unplug the out of control valve and see what happens and that can let you know if your problems are related to the idle control or if they're related to the actual way that the engine is running so I'll just leave this on stepper but the advanced idle control is the one that you can play with and everybody always just leaves this on whatever the drop down option is for their idle control valve so what we're going to do now is I'm going to show you the difference between a few of these so you can see that you can click on whatever you want and ultimately all of these drop downs are doing in is changing these PID control settings so if you're feeling crazy you can come in here and you can adjust all this stuff yourself but the drop downs actually do a good job at kind of giving you some starting points all right we're going to keep this simple all of this ISD ramp down stuff would technically have an effect on this if we were taking TPS into the equation but all I want you to do is watch the IEC position here so a 3000 RPM we're going to go below our Target idle speed so that it tries to just ramp the IC position all the way up as fast as it's programmed or designed to do so if we come back down look how slow and how long that takes for the IC position to come all the way up to 100 and this one I'm talking about how the IEC control valve isn't Magic if that engine was falling and trying to stall that slow IAC you know ramp over the course of several seconds isn't going to be enough to stop it so the engine needs to run well on its own and then the IEC valve is just to kind of stabilize it it's not just gonna it's not a brick wall that's going to prevent the engine from stalling that's all right now let's go to slow and we'll do the same thing you can see this going much slower than before so I'll be old and dead before that gets to 100 so now we'll go to fast and we'll come back down and you can see that went to 100 over the course of I don't know that was one second so looking at this you might naturally think that fast would be better to prevent the engine from stalling but a lot of times what ends up happening is if you're too aggressive with this it'll overshoot undershoot overshoot undispute and then you'll get that surging idle all right moving on down I'm not going to go into this stuff too deep as I cover what all of it is in that PDF so just go download that but I do want to show you a couple of things here so basically once our engine RPM goes below the target it's going to open up the idle control valve and if it's too high it's going to bring it down but what's a little bit interesting is the actual behavior of the IEC position once you reach your target is going to change kind of depending on how far it was before it got to the Target what did he say so let's show you what I mean here so our Target and our actual engine RPM match so our IC position is just holding at a fixed value it's not moving so as far as the computer is concerned it's taking us 42 percent of IEC position to achieve our Target idle but watch what happens once we move away from our Target and then come back to our Target you would think that the IEC position would end up at the same spot but it doesn't from the way bring it back now it's at eight the other direction bring it back 41. so that's just something to keep in mind theoretically once the engine is running this should match a whole lot better but it just gives you a little bit of perspective on kind of how that works all right next thing we're going to look at we're going to crank our engine RPM up pretty high now you see our IC position is at zero because the things were idling at 5000 RPM but watch what happens once we bring our TPS up above that two percent comes up and you can see that it stopped at 40 and this is one of the things that everybody freaks out about because when they're driving their IC positions at 40 percent and they go nuts it never ends this but if you look up here at our IEC hold position it's not coincidence and next thing we're going to look at here is if we bring our TPS where 5 4500 RPM if we bring our TPS down to zero nothing happened it's still holding the IAC at 50 percent that's where this number here comes into play so I used a thousand RPM as our Target idle speed to make the math real easy for you here so we have a thousand RPM here a thousand RPM here so if we add those two together that's 2 000 RPM I know it so think of this as you're driving and now we're going to come to a stop so we let off throttle and our RPM comes down when you see them holes now we're right above 2000 RPM now watch what happens as soon as we go even one RPM below that now we've re-entered our idle control mode all right so realistically staring at this stupid little data screen is going to be nearly impossible while you're driving the car so if you're not using the data log feature in your EFI system you need to be major key to success I'm going to do two logs real quick one using our Advanced idle control slow the other one using fast and I'm going to show you how we can overlay them on top of each other and that's how you really start dialing in your idle control as you can overlay things and see what changes you're making and what effect they're having on the idle so we need to set up a graph with all of the same channels that we had previously not do anything with timing so we won't worry about that right now and we got to give it a name again poop again and now you can spend as much time as you want analyzing all of this stuff so now you can see here that our actual engine RPM is higher than our Target idle speed so our IEC position is zero and then the actual engine RPM comes below the target idle speed so it progressively brings the idle control valve up and then it gets to 100 because there was no change in actual engine RPM but since there's a split between the two it's going to try and bring the ISE valve in now let's bring on the fast drop down and overlay it on top of this so you can actually really see real world how powerful the comparison tool is on the Data Logger the same thing you see here that one our engine RPM dropped below the target we have this these two points basically lined up look how much faster the ISE ramped in the dotted line is the comparison file and the solid line is the initial file so if you use the time stamps we click here you can see with the ISE control valve basically went from zero to 100 in 1.4 seconds and this low setting took 10.7 seconds so a gigantic difference in how those settings will control the idle control valve so don't be afraid to experiment with them next up we have the IEC parked position and you can see this one is cool and temperature based too this one's just kind of the equivalent of putting your foot on the throttle when the engine is cold so for this we're going to hop over here and I'm going to show you basically what zero percent and 100 does on an engine and you can see what the difference is now this car over here is drive by wire but it works exactly the same just rather than having an idle control valve it just simply opens and closes the throttle to react the same way that an idle control valve would this car starts perfectly normal hot cold whatever with normal IAC park position values in it so for this first test here we're going to try with the IC part just at zero percent and see if it will even start and run I suspect it probably will it might struggle a little bit and then we're going to shut it off we're going to set it to 100 and then we're going to start it again and see if we can't bounce this thing off the rev limit or start it up so let's see what happens all right so the main thing that we're watching here is engine RPM all right that was actually good that it didn't start I did a carburetor swap those fuel injections for now let's do the same thing at 100 ISE position foreign obviously wasn't enough the car wouldn't even start and Run 100 was way too much the car idled really really high so the tuning process would be finding that happy medium to where the car fires up the way that you want and then also keep in mind this is cool and temperature based so you're going to kind of have to figure out what that magical value is at each different coolant point now especially with drive-by-wire and custom tables is where you can really get the thing to do what you want it to do which is nice so I'm going to show you one quick example on that real quick and then we'll wrap this thing up so you can see here car is idling nice and calm and respectable my neighbors wouldn't want to fight me but if we flip this switch I can introduce a custom table and now we can drink Busch Light and grow a mullet if we really want to get crazy we could go to switch number three we could introduce a verbal tune and then we could drive to the top of a mountain and launch the car off of the side of it to make the world a better place but with custom tables you can basically create any offset based off of anything and in this situation I just have it on a switch only for demonstrative purposes no I won't drive a car like this foreign guys so that's uh this much of how your idle control works so definitely make sure that you drop down in the description get that PDF so you can get a little bit more of a breakdown on what all the different tables and settings are and if you're interested in learning far more and watching basically individual videos on each one of these settings and stuff I do have a full course I'll leave a link in the description for that as well but as you can see the idle control is without question the most tedious part of tuning and just for example if you take your car like you drive your car to a tuner and he Tunes it that same day and then you leave he's not going to have the ability to tune any of these coolant temperature based idle control tables so the Holley idle control is pretty straightforward if you're familiar with the stuff so you can kind of put your best educated guess in as far as what it's going to want need at the lower coolant temperatures but if you really want to dial your car in 100 exactly the way that you want it the way you like to drive it it seems that really the only true way of going about that is doing it yourself so the more you can learn about this stuff the more adjustments you can make yourself the happier you're going to be

Channel: Joe Simpson

Views: 21,823

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Id: J3YADanHGBA

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 01 2023