I’m a former Toyota Master Diag Technician, a current Adjunct Automotive Professor at the local community college, and a current instrumentation technician for the local water authority where I commonly wire and program RTU’s/PLC’s for remote site control via SCADA systems.
Computer control of I/O is not a lost concept on me and the wiring is the easiest part of the job.
Yet, I only opened a base tune in the EMU Pro software for a personal project the other day, and the software is not self explanatory AT ALL.
The help menu tries to help, but often answers a question with a question.
In my line of work, it is not uncommon for a technical manual to be a 700+ page document. Yet the manual for the EMU Pro software leaves a shist-ton to be desired.
Anyone have some basic tutorials to get me going? Hell, even a definition of terms and/or glossary would be a start.
Hi,
The EMU PRO documentation is a work in progress.
We continually update and expand descriptions with each new release.
If you can, provide feedback on which sections you wanted to read, but were missing, or which were not detailed enough.
For now, EMU PRO is not intended for customers who are new to the engine calibration world. It was created to provide a more advanced and flexible solution than EMU Classic and Black, and to develop direct injection support. But that doesn’t change the fact that we want to make it more accessible in the future.
If you want to learn about the general concept and fundamentals, you can refer to the EMU Classic manual. It describes most of the basic things that are often done in the same way, regardless of the engine or ECU.
There are dedicated how-to documents for various strategies, as well as a software guide that describes how to navigate the client application. EMU PRO product page.
Other than that, ask specific questions in here. We will address them and attempt to incorporate that information into the help sections for future releases.
I do realize your (ECUMaster’s) intent of aiming the Pro product at an experienced tuner. It is called Pro afterall.
But
It is the option that has enough I/O for a V6, quad-cam, quad vvt, with a DBW tbody, APS, and an available h-bridge for boost control.
I work with things like PLC’s, ABB VFD’s, industrial butterfly valves, sonic flow meters, and modbus communications every day.
Every one of those products has a manual that cover’s its capabilities. And not one of them said: “ We really only intended to sell our products to people who have already used similar things before. So we don’t really have a manual for it. “
I worked for Toyota for 10 years and they never said here is a “pro-level scan tool, but we intended it for techs that already know how to use it so we aren’t gonna go into too much dept about how to use it.”
See how that sounds?
Anyways, as I always do, I’ll teach myself in the absence of help.
I don’t understand the attitude.
Seems like you missed most of the things I wrote and focused on only one.
I said we are constantly working on updating the help sections.
I provided additional resources with relevant information.
I told you that you can ask any questions here.
I asked about specific feedback regarding the help.
We have no idea what your level of knowledge about engine calibration is, so we don’t know what you even expect from a help section like that. If you were expecting a comprehensive tutorial on how to prepare, start, and calibrate an engine from scratch, this is not the place for it. There are dedicated multi-hour courses for that, because 80% of engine calibration is not ECU-specific. Check HP Academy or Evans Performance Academy for courses like that.
If you don’t provide actual feedback, we have no idea what changes to make to improve the help. So let’s make this discussion useful and tell us something that you didn’t understand from the software, and the help was missing or insufficient.
You’re right, and I didn’t think through how that might come off to anyone else.
So far, I’ve only purchased a flying lead harness and not the ECU. So I don’t have a ton of specific questions.
I do have a “base tune” that was supplied to me by an ECUMaster vendor. And I’ve only begun looking through it to see if I could understand the software layout. I’m not ignorant to the fact that the base tune would not be a finished tune and is likely very rough, but enough to get the car running. But the software was enough to make me question if there was a different product out there before I bought the ECU and was committed.
I simply looked to see if I could add an H-bridge controlled boost controller, and without having called you guys in Texas to find that that option was only available if I selected wastegate w/o return spring, it would have taken me more time than I liked to figure it out.
As an example, or maybe a recommendation for future documentation, if you had a description of each of the boost control options, I would not have had to use your tech support to find that.
Yes, I did read some of the smaller break out documents on fuel film, VVt, DBW, ect. Things that I would say are kind of break-outs for built in set-up wizards.
It’s more of the base software that is not that easy to navigate.
But knowing where all the tables are in software, and where they intersect in actions would be a great starter.
Ok, so first, you wanted to confirm if a feature is available. I agree it’s not easy to find information like that. We could solve this by creating a document that details all available features, grouped by specific strategies. Boost would have a section listing supported actuators and outputs. Additionally, we can add a roadmap to that document outlining all the planned features for the future.
That is not true with the newest version.
You only have to select “Electronic wastegate” as the boost mode.
H-bridge is available as an output for the actuator with and without a return spring.
I think it’s just a question of understanding our settings layout. We try to have a natural separation of categories that is consistent across all strategies. If you learn how to navigate one of them, you will understand most of them.
You can also use the search bar at the top of the settings tree. You can write multiple partial phrases to find what you need. For example:
Here I looked for stuff related to the injection angle. Now I can see two tables, one for cranking and one for rail 1. There is a limitation that the search won’t show you things that are hidden due to the current setup, but that is also something we want to address in the future.
