Emerald ECU setup

[lesliehedley]

Hello. I've got an Emerald ECU fitted to my 400SE. It was set up by a local garage and they've done a very good job, but they set it up on the road, not a rolling road. As I said, they've done a really good job but I was wondering, how do they set up the ignition map without a rolling road where you can measure the maximum torque? I like to tinker and I was just wondering if it was possible to extract a bit more from the ignition map myself by tinkering with the ignition map as I use the car day to day. Obviously I don't want to advance the ignition too far or it will knock, but how do I judge how far to move it and which parts of the map to change? Does anyone have any experience of setting up an ECU on normal roads? TIA

[The AJP Griff]

lesliehedley said:

Hello. I've got an Emerald ECU fitted to my 400SE. It was set up by a local garage and they've done a very good job, but they set it up on the road, not a rolling road. As I said, they've done a really good job but I was wondering, how do they set up the ignition map without a rolling road where you can measure the maximum torque? I like to tinker and I was just wondering if it was possible to extract a bit more from the ignition map myself by tinkering with the ignition map as I use the car day to day. Obviously I don't want to advance the ignition too far or it will knock, but how do I judge how far to move it and which parts of the map to change? Does anyone have any experience of setting up an ECU on normal roads? TIA

It can be a long winded process,but great fun too.I don't use the emerald,but does it have a 'follow ecu' type setting,so the load site the car is running on is highlighted when in use?If so then you only need to be able to see wwhich load sites you'd like to try to alter,then alter them!I only ever make adjustment's like this in small steps though,for very obvious reasons.

[trackcar]

Mike's right in that playing around with your own ecu is good fun with a wideband lambda you can get a great fuel map as mike has proved .. we make very litle improvement on his car on the fuelling when it goes on the dyno compared to his on-road mapping (the mike/mel husband and wife team is a good mapping combination!) ..

however once you start tinkering with the ignition advance under load you really need to be looking at the hp generated .. at part throttle you'll do little harm and the surrounding noise will be low enough for you to hear the onset of detonation, but under load you really could do with it set up on the rollers.

The good news for you though is that the emerald is a well-known and well-liked system which almost every rolling road operator in the country will have come across at some point, so a quick check-over of the existing map and then some proper mapping of the ignition at the larger throtle openings will be a very cheap operation.

Good luck

[SneakyNeil]

lesliehedley said:

Hello. I've got an Emerald ECU fitted to my 400SE. It was set up by a local garage and they've done a very good job, but they set it up on the road, not a rolling road. As I said, they've done a really good job but I was wondering, how do they set up the ignition map without a rolling road where you can measure the maximum torque? I like to tinker and I was just wondering if it was possible to extract a bit more from the ignition map myself by tinkering with the ignition map as I use the car day to day. Obviously I don't want to advance the ignition too far or it will knock, but how do I judge how far to move it and which parts of the map to change? Does anyone have any experience of setting up an ECU on normal roads? TIA

I'm 100% not an expert at this stuff, but me and a friend mapped his impreza on the road. You need two people really. For fuel you need a wideband obviousley, for high load ignition we used a combination of det-cans and knock sensor readout to advance to a couple of degrees before pinking. Its just about finding a long, quiet road (i.e. the M6 in the early hours... only kidding officer) and concentrating on little sections at once, passing through them watching & listening, quick tweak, do it again, etc. etc. etc.

I think what you're asking though is how to get to minimum best timing without a rolling road, across the sites where best timing wouldn't be knock-limited? I think the answer is that you can't really. What we ended up doing was working from a base map and looking at other maps for similar spec engines that kind folk showed us, to get the overall shapes of the curves, and just tweaking and getting the day to day driveability up to spec and accepting that there was no more we could do in those areas.

We got it right on the second engine

HTH