How to Tune Holley Terminator X for Beginners. Part 1

In this video, I'm going to try to give you a quick but comprehensive overview of the Holley Terminator X software. So you just installed Terminator If you feel like watching 124 hours of YouTube videos, you'll go through it as quickly as possible assuming you have at least a little experience with electronic fuel injection, even if not, you're starting from scratch, you're a true beginner, you can still learn. a few things from this and most importantly if you have any other questions about any of these tabs or any of these settings that you'd like me to go into further, just comment below and then we can do separate videos.

Everybody's good, let's get started first, the first thing and probably worth mentioning here at the beginning is that the little three and a half inch screen works great as a display or maybe if you want to make a little change here and there, but I don't recommend using that to

tune

the vehicle and I also do not recommend using it to set the base calibration to start the car and all that for the first time, maybe starting it is not so bad, but I think it is much more difficult than doing it through the software and the other thing is that the basic calibrations that create those things are generally extremely aggressive and dangerous, just keep that in mind when you start.

Ok, open your software for the first time. What we need to do is start a new melody file. If you're not familiar with Holley's terminology, they call what is generally known as a calibration file or a melody or melody file, they call it a global file, so since we're starting from scratch it would make more sense to click in create new global file, not at all, so if we do that, everything is set to zero, basically, just zeros for everything, uh, which is not what we want, so close that, go back to the file. and then just click open global file.

This base house is where you can find something that will be pretty close and it gives you this warning that you're about to ruin your life so just click OK, that sounds good so click gm. It's based, so you can click on the settings that seem closest to what you have. Usually this 24x and 58x is the crank trigger, so I usually try to start with something that uses the same crank trigger as the motor I'm actually tuning, if you have it, if you make several of these you probably already Be more than aware that you don't have to start with these files, you can start with another file that you have used before, but For the sake of this video, we are going to assume that this is your first time, so we will click on this turbo 24x now that we have our file open these icons here are the main sections so fuel injectors fuel tab spark plugs a spark tab and so on if you go up here to the toolbox you can go to preferences most of these things are useless , but this checkbox here to show the map is psi helps a lot of people, otherwise it is in kpa, which most people are not familiar with, so make sure you click on it if you want to use psi .

The icf system is usually where it starts. icf is an acronym for something stupid. I think it's like an internal configuration file, it doesn't make sense, but basically click on icf system and this is where we'll start and then work on the top, work down to the ecu settings, make sure you choose any of the two ecu you are using, engine parameters, this is all self explanatory as far as you need to enter the size of your engine, the number of cylinders, the type of fuel you are using here for the type of fuel if you are going to use flex fuel click on gasoline and only use e85 if you are only going to use e85 even then I still only use gasoline you only have an option for an O2 fuel pressure sensor uh this fuel pump primes you can use this, uh, if you want, I think it's the maximum, if you want to drain the fuel pump, you can change it temporarily. so it will work for a long time.

Multiport basically means it has one injector per cylinder. The most important decision you will have to make when adjusting all of this is here in the load sensing, basically the speed density would normally be just If you are using a map sensor but with Holley speed density, the fuel table will use lbs per hour as table values, so if you are familiar with pounds per hour, that is what you would like to use. Alpha n is typically for individuals. cars with a throttle body or maybe something with a nasty camshaft, if you're using the Terminator you probably won't actually use it.

I've never used any of these combos, but the one I prefer to use is based on five because now we are. using volumetric efficiency for all fuel calculations, which makes life much easier. I listen to the information from the fuel injector. This is the main place where I see people freak out and not know what to do and you just click on them they have this big drop down menu for all kinds of different injectors so if you click on it you can see that the dead times and stuff change , so if your injectors are on this list, it's obviously very easy, click on them and that's it, if they are.

You're not on this list, just scroll down to custom enter your fuel injector, so what size are they? If they are 80 pound injectors at 60 pound pressure, enter 80. In this minimum injector opening time, if so, first of all, if I bought fuel injectors worth having, they will give you all this information, just you will have to enter it manually, so let's say we have a minimum open time of 1.1, 80 pounds, 60 pounds of pressure and now all we have to do. is to enter what the off time of these injectors is at each given battery voltage, so if yours is 0.88 right here instead of whatever it was before you changed it, then just enter that and then fill this in now if he just does it.

I don't have injector data for whatever reason, if you select a set of injectors that is pretty close to where the car is going to run, you may need to modify this a little bit and this is another

part

where, for example, if you are in your fuel table and instead of having 40 50 percent it's idling, like let's say it's at 25 or 80, then you know that your injector information is not correct, in which case you can simply modify these numbers and then this time Minimum injector opening is usually specified by the fuel injector company, I have never encountered this problem but I have seen others have it, but let's say your car idles at 1.4 milliseconds, but at 1.2 milliseconds the car just freaks out and shuts down, so you know you can set this to 1.3 milliseconds and I'll never go below that, so the way you're going to run into this is if your fuel table is idle here with these values, you know that 1.4 if you have an offset for any reason, whether it's Excel enrichment or temperature enrichment, these numbers could add or subtract from the value in your table and lead you to a situation where you are running a different pulse width than that I wanted, so basically it's like a ceiling or I guess a floor, so the pulse width I can't go below that value, power-on parameters.

This type of ignition here is the car won't work if you don't do it correctly so they make it pretty simple they have drop down menu for most things so if you have 24 teeth. crank trigger, you just use those knock sensors, single wire knock sensors are not my favorite so pick and choose if you want to use them, but basically, if you are not going to use any knock sensors, choose zero and if you're going to use knock sensors obviously choose how many you have and then you'll have to set all of this up if you plan on using knock sensors that's a little bit deeper than what this video needs to cover so you have basic ios. here, which are inputs and outputs, I don't like the way Holly has her inputs and outputs in multiple different places, so you have an input and output tab here and then another one here for your pin map and it's a bit redundant and annoying.

Basically again if you just read it's 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 like your shield box . This closed loop and learning tab gets a lot of people in a lot of trouble as most of the defaults or everything is set to 100 so basically if you have an O2 sensor that goes bad and fails it gets richer and thinner. The computer will continually try to add 50 plus 50 percent so you can get to a situation where the car won't even start anymore.

Personally, I never use the learning function. I don't like it and usually set my mode to closed. very low loop like maybe 10 or so and this is kind of situational some cars some scenarios uh maybe you know up or down there are some cars some setups that I won't use on closed circuit at all but that's kind of mark that decision In the heat of the moment the individual cylinder fixes are pretty simple in this sense, like if you just wanted to add five percent fuel to cylinder number four, that's all you would do, but this would be adding five percent solar energy number four. all the time, if you click on the usage tables here, you can choose your cylinder and then you can use any access you want to do it, so scaling on this one is a little strange, but let's say just from here to there, with 15 pounds and 14 and a half pounds and up, we add the five percent, but this way we don't add the five percent when we're just browsing and of course, here's another input and output tab, so after we've set this is like the main primary setup, once you are done you can go to the sensors and just choose the sensors you are running so the maps manifold pressure, cts, coolant temp, mats, air temp manifold, oil pressure, fuel pressure, so they're all pretty simple.

Make custom sensors, you'll just need to enter the sensor data here, the fuel tab is where you'll spend most of your time adjusting and you can see, so this is volumetric efficiency, so we're basically working on a scale. I don't know, maybe between 40 and 120 normally, if this were in pounds per hour, these numbers would be much higher and there would be a much bigger difference, but here the scale is quite small and you can look immediately, immediately you look. Look at a table of five and say whether it's

tune

d correctly or not, as you can see here, the highest boost levels we're going up to about 110ve and you know, depending on how high you want to make power in this car, you know these numbers might decrease a little bit at higher rpm, but it looks pretty normal and then you can see it graphically like this, another thing that a lot of people don't know, if you use the arrow keys on the keyboard, you can move this little dot and then If you hold down the Ctrl key and then press plus or minus, you can make the adjustments this way.

I pretty much do all my adjustments in this 3D table instead of this number table. I like to be able to see what I'm doing graphically and then on another. What you can do with this table is here is the smooth button, which I don't recommend ever pressing, even though it's tempting, so if you don't have anything highlighted and you click smooth, it will smooth everything out. but if you highlight a certain area and click smooth, it will just smooth that area, but anyway don't press that one, they should call it the lazy button and the get in trouble button, so a lot of times this smooth feature will be overridden. everything you just did and I've actually made a whole video just on that topic.

Then we have the air-fuel ratio. If you come up here to write, you can choose simple, which basically removes this table and now you just set your idle. cruise and wide open throttle, I don't recommend doing that, just go to 2d and you can make this as simple or complicated as you want, you can go to 14 points, whatever you want it to be and then 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 set that value, so if we highlight all of this, right click and you can fill in the row values ​​or the column values ​​basically the row values ​​will be a horizontal interpolation and then the padding column values ​​will be vertical, so if we continue with that, you can see now, it will reduce from this 12o to this 110, so get used to using those features.

I will use them non-stop. I wish there were hotkeys for them, and now that I say I should probably check the hotkey menu and make sure there aren'tThere are a lot of other ECUs you use like h for horizontal v for vertical or something like that, it's a lot easier than right clicking especially when you're driving around a car and bouncing around this acceleration enrichment is probably one of the trickiest things to understand if you're new to this, so there's a whole There are a lot of different changes you can make, generally speaking, the defaults and these tables are pretty close, but if you open the throttle really quickly and it stumbles, it's very thin and very rich, this is where you would make those changes and I didn't.

I even necessarily understand what they were talking about when I first read it, it's an ae versus map rsc wipe, so basically this is a sensitivity, so if you have a really big throttle body that seems to be too sensitive and you jump to the enrichment when you don't have it. If you want can you know move this number up or down and then obviously tps is for when you step on the accelerator it changes quickly and then the map is for when the manifold pressure changes quickly and then you can do it on temperature Cooling.

This whole section here, I'm sure people want to watch a video about this and we can go into a deeper dive into everything there. So here are the temperature enrichments, so when the engine is cold it will need more fuel to maintain the same air-fuel ratio. So you can see that these values ​​decrease once you get to these warmer values, everything goes to zero, so basically 100 is zero correction. or zero enrichment instead of offsetting the air fuel ratio so you would remove fuel at colder temperatures to get a richer air fuel ratio and then lastly in this one we have air temperature enrichment this It is more of a mathematics that needs so much. more fuel at this temperature, much less fuel at this temperature to maintain the same air-fuel ratio, what you can do here is if you know you're not using methanol and you're using gasoline and your intercooler is terrible, you can do that if you want.

To try to keep the engine alive, you can put a little bit of fuel in it like this, obviously, uh, 200 fuel is overkill and it just moves around so you can see, so here's all your starter enrichment stuff, so during the starter, 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 post start and then basically we're going to reduce this over a certain period of time and then here's the breakdown rate at which it does. So fuel control is just the deceleration fuel cut, so basically all this will do is turn off the injectors if you enable it, as long as you meet all the criteria here.

It seems like for some reason with Holly, most of these files you have everything turned off but you can improve some fuel economy and not let your parachutes and burning things shoot fireballs if you enable this and set it up correctly, so next we have idle and I'm going to go over this real quick because This will probably be the next video I do since this is what I get asked about the most, but checking it with a really fast idle spark is what will adjust the ignition timing based of the difference between the target and actual idle. idle, sometimes I'll use this on a soft camshaft, but there's usually not enough adjustability inside this, so I usually build a custom table or two to offset the timing in different ways depending on how I want it to go. behavior. set your type of idle control uh the GM stuff is usually step by step and then like the Ford and the Hondas they are usually pwm and this ramp down is basically how you will get back to idle and the start is how long it will hold and how long.

It's going to come out of this table here, which is parked basically when you turn off the car, this is where the idle control valve is going to be in the position that it's going to go to, so in this case, when it's negative 40 degrees outside, everything will be So. the open road and this is obviously changed out of the coolant temperature in its position up here, basically you can think of this as the equivalent of keeping your foot on the accelerator and of course we have another inputs and outputs tab, the Idle control within the Holley software, probably.

The worst

part

is that it just doesn't allow enough control, but the good news is that it works well enough that you can get it to work and it's not too complicated. Some other systems, you might know, jump to what seems like 50 different tables. only for idle control so if you have a good understanding of how everything works it works pretty well but it can be very tedious, 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 is the tab of spark, it's basically the same as the fuel tap, so you have your base table, your graph, everything, you can move it around the same way and see everything the same way, same thing if you move the little dot around, you can use the control more or less to move everything you know move the point up or down to start this is basically the amount of time it will run while you start the engine so basically anything below 400 rpm is considered cranking anything after is considered running uh here are your rev limiters you have different types of rev limiter this rev limiter you think would be labeled a little bit differently but these are basically your two steps so you can enable it or disable it, start it, so if you enable it Basically, this is usually done outside the timing of the transmission brake input so that you can adjust the timing, you know, over a certain period of time, you can think of this as control of traction, the esc parameters are disabled, so again, if you are not using, do not control just Zero this table and just like the fuel correction things based on coolant temperature and air temperature, you have the same here over time and what would you know another inputs tab, so next is this inputs and outputs input and output tab, this is where you actually configure and configure whatever you're trying to do.

It's too deep 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 of all. In this, where most people are going to struggle, I set everything up with all the Holley systems, whether it's like a dome control with CO2, where you would use the pid settings and all that good stuff. I'm not trying to increase the time every time almost everything can have a trans brake so that makes sense if you're not comfortable with all these pid and co2 settings and all that good stuff, if you really get into the inlet, out and outputs, I just have it labeled kaboom because I'm an idiot, you're going to configure and then you configure pwm again, you can configure all your accesses here however you want, so let's say above 60 throttle and basically this manifold pressure we can put like 70 so you then run like 70. duty cycle to a solenoid and you know maybe you can start with 30 or 40 percent, do a run, see how much boost it generates and then increase it in five or ten percent increments and then find out that you know, let's say, just say the same thing. conversation with a 70 percent duty cycle equals 15 pounds of manifold pressure, so that's the easiest way to do everything I've seen and heard of guys running an extra intake and then taking advantage of the fact that you know which map sense you are using to run the half. ass like close boost control that way, I don't really like doing it like that, next step is the transmission as you would have to have an xmax ecu to do this and then it can control a few different transmissions again, a video for another day.

There's a comparison feature here which I don't like the way they've presented it here, but if you open two files you can see the differences between the two and you can copy and paste some things. I use that function. quite a bit in some other programs I don't really use it much in holly pin map this is basically where you're wiring all your stuff and it's all 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 the data logging and there are a few different things here inside the timing ecu, that's where you automatically set the tps, which you'll need to do before you can start the car for the first time. it opens up your little gauge panel, if you right click on things you can make changes again.

I'm not active with the computer so I can't do anything. It opens it in a separate tab, which I find very annoying, so I never use it. that and then this toggle strip is like a real-time data logger, so instead of seeing numerical values ​​like on these screens, it will just plot things that may be useful for setting up certain things and probably the last thing we need. What we know here is that you can toggle all of these so that this engine is running and it shows that all of these different values ​​will populate with what's actually happening and if you click on this little e, you can drag and drop, like for example, if we want to see.

Number 10, we can put in our closed loop state, our pulse width, rpm, etc., and then it will appear and basically this way you can see whatever you want to see however you want. and they are quite useful again. I wish they were a little more customizable, but they do what you need them to do. That will be enough for this video. If there is anything else you would like explained in detail, let me know. You know that and I can make more videos about the different settings, tables, parameters and all that good stuff. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and I'll see you in the next video.