I am embarrassed to admit how much time I have spent researching the whole megasquirt thing without really finding out the "basics".

I completely understand how a motor works and I understand that tuning is simply changing parameters such as fuel and timing. I know where ideal AFR's are for cruise, idle and heading into power/boost. I need to know how to "tune" I need to get a grasp on all of the different tables, kpa, enrichment and what all of these things do to my car. I need a video or a source that will tell me everything I need to know so that I can dive in head first and start tuning my car.

How is analyze live in terms of daily driving? Can I basically plug the unit in with the base map loaded and start running this "autotune"? What is the fix when I have hot start issues? What is the fix when I have misses or bog when cruising around town? I really need a crash course here.

Trust me, the last thing I want to do is ask you guys for a point in the right direction but I want to do this right the first time.

 

Hi Shane,

I understand how daunting it can be...

Before you start tuning you want to make sure your thermistors are correctly calibrated, air density correction is set correctly and injector data is right, otherwise you're just chasing your tail. Make sure your wideband is behaving itself 100%.

With cranking fuel, if the car doesn't start, 95% of the time it's not enough fuel. It will smell rich because of the unburnt fuel but don't let this confuse you.

Once you get the car to start you may need to use a bit of throttle to stop it from stalling until you set the idle valve correctly and ensure the idle mixtures are close.

Set the idle cells in the VE table to whatever mixture gives you the most vac. Make sure the table is smooth or the interpolated values are going to be weird. Turn on headlights, A/C or whatever you can to move into other load cells.

From here on just set up a sensible lambda target table and work from rich down to your target.

Timing is harder - make sure you have det cans on when tuning, especially if you are adding timing. This is so much easier to do with a load dyno where torque can be sensed.

You can read about this stuff all day but for me I didn't really sink in until I got stuck in and just did it.

Cheers

 

Good news, you pretty much know 90% of it for DD purposes.

I drove around with VEAL on for 2 or 3 hours, following the instructions. Then I added accel-pump enrichments by looking at my wideband while I floored the throttle. Took ~30 mins to get it nice and smooth.

Tuning cold start was the only thing that IMO was moderately difficult, and that just took time and experimentation.

That said I started with a Reverant MS3 Basic and the base map was phenomenal, I never needed to touch the idle settings.