[SC TUNE GUIDE #1] HPTuners; Goblin Basic Settings

ctuinstra

Goblin Guru
I'm going to do much the same as OptimizePrime did over in the Tuning>SS/TC section and cover some of the basic set up and changes I have made to the supercharged version. While you may not want to make every setting, and I don't suggest you do, I want to cover some that you may want to learn more about and decide for yourself if they are right for you. I am a firm believer there is not one perfect tune, your needs, build, expectations, driving, etc. all may be different. I also don't pretend to be an expert on this and I am open to correction, I don't want to steer anyone wrong.

Some values you see below will be in blue and others in green. That's because I have a stock file also open as a compare file and the items that are the same are in blue while the items that are not the same as stock are in green. This does not indicate that you need to change yours, that's just so you know why they are in different colors.

Starting off with the General tab. Don't change anything here, ever (unless you have severely modified your engine and it's no longer a 2.0). That was easy, we are off to a great start!

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Idle - RPM
Here you can adjust your idle speed. Sometimes it helps to raise them just a bit if you have larger injectors that don't flow well at low RPM (extremely low duty cycles or short pulses). It's better to leave the cooler temps a bit higher until the engine warms up. This is how I have mine set, 50 RPMs higher than stock.

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Airflow - General - MAF Calibration
Later when I cover tuning, the MAF calibration table will be modified during the MAF tuning. This is the primary table used to calibrate the MAF (Mass Airflow - the sensoring of the amount of air entering the engine). DO NOT make your table match mine. Everyone's will be different. Do not just change numbers unless you are actually tuning or know what you are doing. A little change here makes huge differences! At the low end of the table it basically looks flat and no different, but just a decimal point can make big differences in the AFR. That's why is so important to get this spot on. Any changes in your intake from stock can throw this tuning out of adjustment.
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Airflow - General - Main VE
Again this table will be used for the Speed Density or otherwise known at VE tuning. DO NOT make your table match mine, they all will be very different. This table is used to figure how much air is in each cylinder in case the MAF should fail and also to provide a base to check the MAF. So at each engine RPM and manifold pressure, it knows about how much airmass is in the cylinder to calculate the proper amount of fuel to add during each injector cycle. You get this right, the car can run fine off of this table alone and not even use the MAF! As part of the tuning process, you dial this table in and you will know when you are getting it right as the car will run just fine while the MAF is disabled.
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Airflow - Dynamic - Dynamic Airflow
These will be used during the tuning process to force it into running only off of the MAF or off of the VE tables above. DO NOT change yours to this setting until you are in the process of tuning. You will lower these for MAF tuning and raise them for VE tuning. Otherwise leave them as they are.
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Fuel - General

If you change your injectors, one of the first things you will do is to input new values in the Flow Rate vs. KPA. This is telling the ECM how much fuel it can expect to inject into the engine at a give manifold pressure. Stock injectors are 38lbs/hour (I believe). Many times the first thing to change on these engines is the injectors to pump more fuel in and it's not uncommon to see 60lbs/hr or even 80lbs/hr for E85. There is a lot of talk about the limits of this table hard set at 63lbs/hr and how to get around that, but I'm not going to go into that now, that's an entire thread in of itself.
The Min PW is the shortest amount of time the injector can open properly. Larger injectors can't open for short period as well as many smaller injectors can. You would only change this to the specs of your new injectors. The same goes for the Short Pulse Limit and Adders, these are all setting to help with the short pulses the injectors have to make at low RPM. Some changes here can help with idle issues such as surging, but should be addressed with proper fuel tuning first.
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Fuel - Oxygen Sensors
The O2 Readiness ECT will be changed during tuning to force the ECM not to go into closed loop. Closed loop is when the ECM uses the O2 sensor readings of the AFR to correct fueling and trims to keep the engine running as close as possible to the commanded AFR (typically 14.7). During tuning, you don't want the system making changes and trying to correct things while you are trying to determine how far off your tune it. You need everything to stay stable and the same while you are making adjustments. The same goes for the Closed Loop Enable and the Long Term Fuel Trims, all of these will have to be set properly during tuning, otherwise leave them alone. The Closed Loop Enable just allows it to go into closed loop after the engine warms up a bit. The Long Term Fuel Trims are semi-permanent (for a long time) trims or adjustments your ECM is making. A good example of this is if you live ocean-side, your trims will be adjusted for the lower altitude and then when you drive to the mountains, the trims will change for the higher altitude. There are short term trims which are very short, milliseconds, and are used to fine-tune the fuel delivery constantly.
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Fuel - Power Enrich

Power enrichment is basically to help protect your engine and help achieve maximum power during WOT (Wide Open Throttle). I have mine available to come in when the TPS (Throttle Positions Sensor) is at 40 and the ramp in (Enrichment Rate) is faster that stock. There is a bit of delay and it does ramp in. I have watched this on the scanner. It's not nitrous! So don't think that you can change these values to get a hit by dumping fuel, it will only make it run worse. At WOT, the exhaust gas temps start to climb and this is to help keep things from melting down.
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To continue on this, the Power Enrichment EQ Ratio is a value that modifies the target AFR. Typically the target AFR is going to be 14.7 (stoich for gasoline). When the PE ramps in all the way, the target AFR will be 14.7 / 1.250 = 11.76. So during full PE, the AFR will be 11.76 during WOT. Mine, as shown here, was changed by my tuner to be one value all the way through the table while stock has more of a ramp, lower on the bottom and higher on the top. I haven't decided if I want to go back to stock yet. I may just leave it as is.
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Fuel - Temperature Control
I have removed the Catalyst Protection as most of us don't have a cat anymore, so there is no reason for it. Also I would leave the Piston protection alone at stock. I've seen some tunes where this is set too high or off. That's just my opinion.
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Fuel - Cutoff, DFCO

Here is another area that you will need to modify during tuning. I'm not going to cover everything here because you don't need to change much of it other than during tuning. Some will leave DFCO disabled (more on that later). First, if you want, you can change your RPM limits for in gear or 1st gear. I don't know if these cars actually know if it's in gear or which gear. Don't go crazy with raising your limits.
DFCO (Deceleration Fuel CutOff) is basically cutting fuel when you let off of the gas pedal in order to save gas. This can really mess up the tuning process during data logging when it just goes incredibly lean during shifting or braking. For this reason, many values in here are changed during the tuning process to ensure DFCO is not active. All of this will be covered later in the tuning threads. Some people like this permanently disabled because it can cause popping during decel, but I personally would rather just leave it on. Sometimes the popping just sounds like a small backfire and bad tuning.
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Spark

I'm going to skip over most of the spark tab. I don't recommend changing anything here until you have mastered AFR tuning and HP tuners. It's not hard to tune the spark advance, but it's a whole other topic unto itself.
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Torque Model
I have zeroed out all of the tables here for the A/C compressor since we no longer have A/C and there is no loss. Nice, an easy one!
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Torque Management - General
First, change the Traction Control System and disable it by raising the Enable Temp to a point that it won't work, such as 400 degrees here, unless you want the car to help control traction under high throttle.
Here is where you can modify the toque delivery and possibly help some with the jerkyness of the throttle. You can modify the ETC Limits -ETC TPS Max table to change how the car reacts to the driver throttle input. This table works with the Spark Retard table to "slow" the response to the throttle. ZZP LOVES to zero all of this out and remove it so you "feel" like your car is a lot faster because it's so much more responsive. Now you take that and multiply it with a vehicle that weights half of what it used to and it becomes unbearable to drive! Maybe you like it zeroed out, but I hated it! Mine is somewhere between stock and zeroed, so I split the difference. Some days I think I would like to change it to stock or even softer. Plenty of time for that playing around later.
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So this is the stock table. The engine speed is along the top and the desired torque is down the left side. So if you are cruising at 1800 RPM and you are just wanting to stay the same speed and only require 100lbs of torque, looking at the chart the percentage is 10. This is the maximum allowed throttle position based upon the current torque being delivered. Obviously as you stab the throttle, you are requiring more torque, so the it's going to go down the table to the point where you reach 100% you have all the torque available. Lowering the numbers in this table is going to make the throttle less responsive and raising them or making them all 100% is just going to make it super touchy and very responsive.
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This is my current table. I'm not suggesting you need this too, this is where I left it after playing with it. In the future I want to really dive in to it and see what it does with drastic changes of lowering values.
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And the Spark Retard table is used in conjunction with the ETC TPS Max table to affect the amount of spark retard to achieve the desired percentage of torque reduction. Again ZZP likes to zero out this table and I don't believe it's a good idea in the Goblin.
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Torque Management - Supercharger
This entire tab is all about controlling and limiting boost. I'm not going to go into everyone of them, I'm getting tired. This is one of those areas that you can copy what I have and it should not be a problem. Basically boost is not limited. Actually on my car, the vacuum line to the solenoid has been removed so there is no way to limit it anyways, so for me, much of this doesn't even come in to play. Again the blue is stock and the green is not.
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mike_sno

Goblin Guru
Hi Chad,

I have the NA 2.2 LAP engine and was wondering if I get it a little more responsive and looked at the Torque Management - General and the other tabs. It looks different for me and I was wondering, if you disable the Traction Control System by enabeling it at 400F, do you need to change the spark retard or is that ignored?

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I also can not find the general ETC TPS Max vs. RPM vs. %Max Available Torque. Like you had a screenshot posted.

I found this one ETC per gear, but the percentage is going only until 16% so it does not really make sense to me.
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Lastly, I also can not find the Retard vs % Torque Reduction.
 

ctuinstra

Goblin Guru
Unfortunately I cannot help much with a different ECM.

If you are asking about TCS and the method, I would set it to enable at the max temp (400F) and then disable all of the methods, Spark, Fuel, and ETC, just to be sure.
 

mike_sno

Goblin Guru
I figured trying that. I set the TCS enabled temperature to 400F and took the car for a spin. Could not tell a difference in the responsiveness. Will try to disable the other methods too and see if that changes something.

I wonder if the NA 2.2L does not have the spark retard since the power is not that high.
 

ctuinstra

Goblin Guru
TCS is traction control, to keep the wheels from spinning. This is not to be confused with ETC Torque Management, that is controlling the torque applied to the output based upon the commanded torque versus RPM. It basically tends to smooth out the torque deliver. The 2.0 SS I based this write up on did not have traction control, only torque management.
 

mike_sno

Goblin Guru
Ok, i thought that would all be part of the same. TCS lowers the torque, ETC lowers the torque just based on other factors. I wonder why I don’t find any ETC.
Do you have any idea what Tip In Torque Management is and how that improve the engine responsiveness?
 

Gtstorey

Goblin Guru
Each ECM has many more "tables" than what HPT has unlocked and some have fewer unlocked than others. It depends a lot on how many vehicles the ECM came in and how much tuning interest HPT expected.

On top of this they often don't touch a lot of the ETC tables since they have to communicate and match with the throttle body module. And you can't change them much without throwing it into reduced power mode.

And GM may not have seen any reason to use torque management on the base cobalt.
 

mike_sno

Goblin Guru
I have a general question. I want to start tuning the MAF sensor. Have done some preliminary adjustments with the short and long term fuel cuts, but now have a wide band sensor available.

Since I do not have a dyno and do street tuning, my plan was to go in like 3rd 4th gear and slowly accelerate. Making sure that each cell has enough hits to get a good reading. I will most likely stay in an area where the bypass valve is open and no boost is created. With that being said, will I even see the highest airflow in that case?

E.G. if I accelerate the engine slowly to 7000rpm and I am at 7000rpm, I will not have boost. Wouldn't that mean 7000rmp with boost would see a higher airflow as I would record the way I was planning it?

I made the HP Academy online course for tuning, but they are not talking about boosted setups for MAF tuning. How do drive to street tune the MAF ?
 

Gtstorey

Goblin Guru
Continue to adjust non-pe throttle with fuel trims. Use wideband for wot throttle only. As far as how to drive, it will depend on what kind of filters you put in place. With the right filters in place you can drive however you want to and it will filter out data you don’t want.
 

Gtstorey

Goblin Guru
Because all of the professional tuners and all of the more experienced tuners on the HPT GM gen3 and Gen4 forum’s recommend it. Because my car comes stock with a wideband and it works better to use fuel trims. If you are going to have the car in closed loop when you are driving it, it’s going to be adjusting fuel trims anyway. Because aftermarket widebands can be inaccurate especially on the output feeding into HPT.
 

Rauq

Goblin Guru
Tuning via fuel trims with the narrowband is common, it's easy, and it's effective. Don't be scared of it.

If you want to do wideband tuning, tune the whole MAF curve. If you're only going to try to do part of it, don't try to do just the bottom of it. If you only want to do the bottom of the MAF curve, do it with fuel trims.

If you're set on wideband tuning, turn off all the compensations- DFCO, short term and long term fuel trims, etc., multiply your MAF curve by 1.1 (or whatever you think appropriate to approach actual from the rich side), then do a few half throttle 3.5k RPM pulls. If you're not lean, either apply corrections at that point or lengthen your pulls and then do them. This is obviously not a comprehensive tuning guide, in no small part because I'm not particularly familiar with the E67.

To clarify on one of your earlier questions, the MAF curve doesn't care about RPMs, so you're not going to be able to log the whole MAF range without using all the RPMs and making all the boost. You can either do pulls in a higher gear to give more time/hits in each cell, or do more pulls. Steady throttle will be your friend.

I will add, too, in my experience, fuel trims will get your low end dialed in more effectively and more easily than the wideband. I personally attribute this, particularly on the P12, to corrections being made that I can't see or control but that fuel trims account for transparently.
 

mike_sno

Goblin Guru
I am not scared of dialing in my maf curve with the fuel trims and a narrow band. I did that until now, but now I have a wideband sensor available.

It is my understanding that if you want to tune your maf curve with the fuel trim tables you have to disable power enrichment. Otherwise the ECU will command something else but 14.7, which effectively is not been measurable with the narrowband. Yes, I could add a ton of filters to filter them out, but that would also filter out WOT. With that being said, I would prefer leaving power enrichment on to not run on 14.7 during WOT.

Am I missing here something?
 

Gtstorey

Goblin Guru
You use fuel trims for anytime the eq ratio equals one and when it goes into pe with wideband. Not sure what the problem is.
 

mike_sno

Goblin Guru
No problem, I read your first comment again and you suggesting a mix of both. Narrowband fuel trim and wideband for PE tuning. All good.
 
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