How to Tune Holley Terminator X for Beginners - IDLE CONTROL TARGETS // Holley EFI Idle Tuning

What's up everyone, welcome back? What happens in this video? Let's do a quick review of the

idle

control

and the Holley Terminator We will do some examples. That car is the worst case scenario. It may very well never work properly, but that's a story for another day instead of showing it to you. Like the values ​​that you're going to use to make this work, I'm going to show you how, why and what the tables themselves do and then based on that information you should be able to make the adjustments to get the car to

idle

. Well, okay, we'll start by just opening a random file, just some of this crap helps you a lot to get started with this little gauge that looks like a tachometer, here's your idle

control

and then here's all the different things we need to adjust, so first. and most importantly, before you can really dial in this idle control, you need all the fuel and the car needs to run really well first.

That said, you can't have 30 percent learning and 30 percent closed-loop correction and expect everything to work. it works fine, but if you're not sure what I mean by whether your fuel and stuff are set correctly, the easiest thing is to just go in here and disable the closed loop and disable learning if the car starts and runs. and the air and fuel are close to where you want it to be, then you should be ready to start adjusting the idle. Another thing I found to be very helpful is to start adjusting the idle when the car is warm and let the car idle very well when it's hot. before going back and then trying to adjust the cold start, the cold start is a lot harder to fix, but the car spends a lot more time when it warms up, so get this hot stuff right and then you'll know it's right and then we can fix startup if we go back here to the inactive tabs, the iac settings is where I would recommend starting as far as iec control, just choose whichever one you are using, you can use gm lsx or 5.0 ford or the two most common. obviously you would select that or whatever else you're using with the wired drive, it's worth playing with slow, medium and fast if you can't get any of these other things to work, but basically these are all presets.

This custom tab will allow you to configure all your own PID control. If you're watching a video on how to

tune

Holley Terminator you can go here for iec type, step by step is like a ls pwm is like a ford disc by cable Obviously it's just that and then you can't select any if you're not using an idle control valve. Now something I have to stop and say, since I run into this quite often, is that you have to have an idle air control valve on the engine. order any of the things to work without the idle air control valve, nothing will work with the exception of the idle spark tab here, but none of these other things will work, so once you have the idle control type set , then I would idle here and it doesn't matter if it's your grandma's 89 buick or your rich neighbor's 2020 lamborghini, all fuel injected cars will start at a higher rpm as the coolant temperature is cold and then they will rise progressively. to where your idle will be once the vehicle is warm these temperature ranges will be different depending on where you live at the time of year and then what type of car could be considered fully heated at 160 degrees and the next one may not be fully heated warmed up to 2 40.

This is all personal preference and a matter of the car, with cars you know it's a stock 92 honda civic like you can let it idle at 600 rpm. and you may only need 800 rpm when cold, and if it's quite aggressive you may need to idle at a thousand rpm when warm and you may need to idle at 1500 rpm when cold, you'll just have to play with these numbers and generally I try to make them as low as possible and then make the engine happy now. If you're not familiar with what the idle air control valve does, the name makes some of it self-explanatory.

Does it control the idle, but how does it do it? It's actually an air bleed, so the easiest way to think about it is to bypass the throttle body without air after the throttle body, which will cause the idle to increase, so if that doesn't work. makes sense to you, it's the electronic equivalent of putting your foot on the accelerator pedal just a little bit and opening the idle blade and it will simply allow more airflow which will increase torque, more torque means higher idle. so in some situations when the engine is heavily modified you may have to adjust the throttle stop on the throttle body to mechanically break the throttle vane, at which point it will be your zero point, so if your valve idle air control has to operate at 100 open and is still not high enough at idle if you break the throttle blade with the throttle detent you can now reduce the duty cycle of the idle control valve and you really want try to make the idle duty cycle work as little as possible.

If the thing requires oscillations from zero to 100 degrees, it takes time to do it and all the pid control will go crazy, so you want the idle control to just do a little work, in which case I'll set the throttle. to where it's a little bit below my target idle when the engine is warmed up, so let's say my target idle is 800 rpm with the idle control off, I could set the throttle body to 770 rpm or 750 rpm again, All this. it's going to change for car based on the modifications but you need to set that zero point so after adjusting the throttle body and resetting that stop you will need to recalibrate the throttle position sensor because in order for the idle control to work the throttle position sensor throttle position you need to know where zero percent throttle is and if you don't do the auto setting, once you open the throttle body the tps sensor will now read, you know, depending on how much you shift it might read five or six percent, so it may never enter idle control.

You understand what I'm saying now that we've set up our type of idle control. We have set our idle speed. The IEC parked will be the next thing that What we are going to look at with the iac parked is during cranking while you are turning the key, this will be the value that it will keep the idle air control valve at just like most other tables idle, this is done outside The coolant temperature when it's really cold outside you'll see it's 100 so basically you're trying to allow as much airflow through as possible and then as the engine warms up you don't need to so much, so if the engine starts. and the rpm goes up a lot more than you want then you would lower these numbers and then if you are pulling away and you have to keep your foot on the accelerator to get it to start then you would need to bring these values ​​up now that being said this is assuming everything the initial fuel feed process is correct and it just needs more airflow, this is how I would increase the airflow, but this will not correct the poor fuel feed, so if we go back Here in our IEC setup, this idle spark it's just that we will actually adjust the ignition timing to compensate and absorb the differences in your idle control.

The idle control valve itself takes time. There is a mechanical delay between its opening and closing. where the ignition time is instantaneous, the p term and the d term are basically how fast it's going to react the higher this number is the faster the up and down time will increase and the lower it is the more it's going to be ​​gradual, so you can play with that a little bit and then the d term is like the brakes, so it doesn't try, p is going to try to get the time to go in the direction it wants to go. as fast as it can and then the d will try to slow down once it starts getting closer to where you want it to be again.

There is a completely different video but that's what it does, enabling idle spark makes a pretty big difference. and just increase or decrease these values ​​and see if it changes the idle state the way you want. I find that you can increase these values ​​quite a bit and the difference is quite minimal many times, in fact I turn this off and I will build a custom table so that everything does what I want it to do the way I want it to, but you guessed it, that's another video, so next we have the start position of iac, so basically once we get over this ic.

In the park position, you go through the cranking rpm and into what would be considered the engine running. Now we're going to enter the IEC start position, so what our IEC start position will do is hold the idle at a higher position for this time, uh, so clearly in this example here it would hold it for four seconds and then we would enter in the fall time, which is how long it will start to decrease if you increase this number that that ramp will take. You know, obviously in this case it's going to take four seconds before it comes out of the iac start position and just goes into the normal idle control and if you were to set this to one second then you know it would slow down a lot faster now.

I think the easiest way to describe how this is all going to work is to get it out there. No, some people can be the most difficult, so basically let's turn the key on and get started. When we start the engine at that point, whatever our coolant temperature is at that time, it will be our IEC park position, so we can draw it like this and pretend it's straight once we're out of the start. in our starting position ic so we're going to hold it for four seconds and then we're going to bring it down for four seconds so at that point we're going to progressively lower it like this and then once we get past that.

We're going to keep our target idle, which would be like your standard idle control, so let's say, for the sake of conversation, that it boots up just fine, slows down exactly the way we want, and then stays idle, so now, a once we've gotten Beyond all that, these settings are the main ones that you're going to be playing with that will dictate how the car returns to idle, so the iac hold position is, let's say, our idle control works usually at zero. acceleration percentage once you accelerate and start driving and keep the throttle position above zero, the idle control valve will go to this IEC hold position, which in this case is 40, let's say it will take a 20 percent percent to maintain our normal idle when we are stopped, so now when we are moving or freely accelerating the engine, we pass that zero percent of the throttle so we can get out of the idle control, now we are going to go to the IEC hold position.

So basically the entire time we're driving, we'll go from this point and it'll go up pretty quickly and then stay at 40 percent. This ramp value is basically irrelevant. I don't think it's adjustable because your foot. You're going to open the throttle enough that the idle control valve won't make a difference. Basically what we're trying to do here is we want it to be open to a certain extent so that when we close the throttle. The idle control valve is open and that way we can gradually control how we are going to lower it back to idle.

Okay, we're driving, we're at 3000 rpm cruising, we let off the accelerator completely, what's going to happen? Now the engine revs are going to drop very quickly, as fast as you know the engine will allow that to happen and that's where we're going to get into these revs above idle to start the ramp, so even though we've let off the throttle, let's to keep this forty percent hold value until we get to this value right here, which is a thousand, uh, whatever we set, but in this case it's a thousand rpm above any kind of idle target, so yeah we say that If we are here at 700 rpm at this temperature, then we would be at 1700 rpm, so now once our engine reaches 1700 rpm, the idle control valve will start to move slowly during this period of time, in this case, obviously, it's five seconds. and then once we get past that point, once it comes back down, in this case it's 50 50 engine rpm above our target idle, so it was 700, so once we get to 750 engine rpm engine, now theidle will go.

We go back to our standard, our main idle control, as if the car were stationary, so basically what we're trying to do with all of this is gradually reduce the engine rpm until it revs up nice and smooth, and basically the target is where you can't notice anything that's happening, the power drops and returns to a good idle state, I think there needs to be more adjustability than there is currently here, but if you spend some time almost every day. I've been able to get this to work once, the two things I really wish it had and there are other ways you can manipulate it, but there's nothing out of the box, there's no gear detection, so it doesn't work. know the difference if I'm in parker neutral or if the car is in gear and depending on the torque converter that's in the car, you can idle it like a million dollars in neutral, but then you put it in gear and the engine dies, in which case you have to do all the idle control in gear, so that's one problem and then the other.

The problem is that you don't have speed as an option here because sometimes if you're just freely accelerating in neutral these values ​​can work great, but once you're driving down the highway and you're going 60 miles per hour or 160 miles per hour . time, you might want some different offsets based on that, so I wish those things were built into just the standard idle control, but unfortunately it's not, if we go back to our drawing here, I forget where I left off, let's start again Of course, someone upstairs, damn door, zero percent, I can't do this with that thing in the background, damn, okay, so let's start here, our starter that is, let's say we're at fifty percent, so We're at 50 as you see here and then we're going to hold it for four seconds and then we're going to slowly increase it for four seconds, so we're going to say that's where we're kicking off so we're.

We'll hold this here for four seconds and then we'll slowly decay it for four seconds and then at that point we'll go to what we would consider our normal idle standard, so that's how our entire startup holds. a normal idle is going to work so now we're going to go in once we start driving so again we're sitting here at standard idle now we're going to start driving and our idle position is going to jump to this value which is 40 , so we're up here and now we're going to cruise at 40 percent, so now we're going to release the throttle completely until we reach the zero percent throttle position and now a thousand. rpm above idle, which is 700 rpm, so at 1700 rpm we're going to start this drop, so we let off the throttle here, we're going to hold that 40 percent until we get to 1700 engine rpm.

Someone else is here, you have to be. You're kidding, so we have a normal idle position, we're at zero percent throttle, so let's call this twenty percent, once we start driving, we come out of idle control mode, this will jump to our 40 percent. cent and we will maintain what this value is. here now, once we let off the throttle, close the throttle paddle completely at a thousand rpm above our target idle, so at 1700 rpm the idle will now start to drop from 40 over the course of five seconds until let's get to 50 rpm above the idle target, so in this case it will be 750 rpm at 1700 rpm, this value will start to slowly decrease like this and then once it reaches 750 rpm, which is 50 percent above of our idle target, it will do what you need. do to get back to this value so theoretically it would be like this and you will see that sometimes they jump down and up and do some things but the more of this you can remove from the equation the generally better it will work and you would do that by adjusting the hold value , the sink rate and then the rpm above idle to go back to the normal idle control and then also basically all of these values, you just have to play with them and If you get too aggressive with this, it will have some sort of effect cruise control.

Okay, I'm trying this one last time, so what you can do is change this IEC retaining position. You can actually change your idle speed to let's say like 1500 rpm whatever and in fact let's try to idle it at 1500 rpm right at a dead stop and then look at your data log and see what the actual idle position is and then you can use that as a reference point to set this value um or in this case of this example, I guess it would be 1700 rpm, so you go to 1700 rpm and see what the position of the idle air control valve is and then you can use that value right here, but you have to play with all of these. values ​​there's no one size fits all and there's really no right or wrong way to do it as long as the car is idling the way you want, now it's okay if you adjust this ramp down right here, ie.

I'm going to change this slope here, so if you tip it down really fast, you'll have less of a cruise control effect, but you'll be more likely to have the idle dip and go below where you want it to be now if you spend too much time. so you try to slow down and the car won't actually slow down because again it will act like the throttle is open so you have to find that middle point and then where you'll come back to. be idle like Oops, that's not very clear, this right here is really what taking this to where you're happy is really going to be where you're going to spend most of your tinkering.

I'm a gangster, okay, because Of all the interruptions that didn't go as planned, but let's try moving some of these numbers around in a car and you'll be able to see it in a data log and, in theory, it should make a little more sense, then it's okay. I don't know anything about this

tune

or this car, it really just arrived, this is just what was inside, this car is a little rough around the edges, I don't know how well it works, but again, I'm not necessarily showing you what. values ​​to use for it to work correctly.

I'm showing you what everything does and what the target does. We'll move some of these values ​​around and see what happens, so we'll start with just a cold. start forget it has a weird button to start it and basically it doesn't start just to get this working let's see if we can increase this a little bit so I'm nothing more. You can see that it increases the iac parks. The position gave it enough airflow to turn on and now it will progressively go down, so what I'm going to do is turn this off until it warms up nicely, so if we look at this log we can see here when it would turn on.

It did not fire, the ic position remained at 73 percent. Here are the rpms where I just didn't want to do anything. Here we turned it up to 100 and then you can see that it finally turned on and then stayed there. our time period given here, which was four seconds, then it started to decay, which is right here. I don't do drugs when I'm about to start, I just don't have to deal with it anymore and then after it subsides you can see. all this irregularity is the actual pid control so this is basically our basic idle control and the rpm is still here quite high so it will probably progressively decrease as it warms up and the idle goes down so now that the Engine is warmed up, let's move. come with some of these settings and someone kill me please make some drastic changes to these settings so we can see the difference okay let's duplicate everything so now we are in a cooler position we are only at 50 and then you can see, once the engine started, how much longer it held that 50 uh and then the down ramp is also longer and then unfortunately, since it's not tuned, everything has to increase, generally or generally speaking , all your beginning and your base. it's going to be higher than the actual standard idle control, now we're going to start, we're going to rev it up a little bit and we're going to start paying attention to these things, it sounds rubbish, we're going to turn on the spark off idle control as well so you can see the difference there, so now you can see we're at our normal idle control here we throttle it, it comes out of idle control and just holds the iac for a fixed value.

I have the target idle at a thousand rpm and then the ramp down starts a thousand rpm above that so you can see once you get to 2000 rpm you can see this starts to gradually decrease and then we get to 1050 which is 50 rpm above our target of a thousand you can see it pulls back and starts to go into normal idle control mode again now if you look here this straight line is our ignition timing which is 28 degrees and then the base timing is 28 degrees and then you can see here when the idle time is enabled you can look at all this jerky it's the pid control trying to stabilize the idle again here is where it's off here is where it's on and again I haven't tuned this or done nothing with this and if you look at the base timing, we're just We're using the simple one with a fixed 28 degrees and then all the modifiers are zero, so it's just a flat number, now let's move some of these numbers around pretty drastically and see the difference, let's double everything and Try this, actually, since the starter on this thing is so ridiculous, let's turn this down a little bit, see if that helps, see what happens, see how much faster it starts to drop the rpm, the rpm boot, so if we look at this now, you can see. how much more irregular the timing will be as a result of changing those pid values, but the main thing I'm most concerned about here is our normal idle control, here's the iac position as it's ramping up to our current hold value of 80 percent cent, so now You can see we're holding our 80 percent and now our drop here is much slower and we go from 50 to 100 rpm up before our normal idle control starts and then it jumps back and stays standard.

The idle control is about 60, which is too much, so we'll make some adjustments to the throttle body, but ultimately, this right here we're going to try to avoid this drop. Alright guys, that'll do it for what started out as a very basic video, quick, deliver a bit more of that, sorry it's a bit all over the place with all the interruptions, but that's what I deal with all the days now. If there is any aspect of this that you want to see more of, just comment below. let me know what you want to see and I'd like to make a video on how to set one up and let it idle properly and again this is just to show you how it all works and what the

targets

are actually doing to you.

You need to understand what the

targets

are doing before you can make the actual engine rpm and idle control and everything do what you want it to do, so the target is the most important part in terms of understanding how it works, the rest They are just numbers in motion. until the two things match up, so as always, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video. I'll get rid of all this, damn it.