HP Tuners Tutorials

[Gregski]

makes sense to disable the Secondary Air Injection codes since we don't have an air pump, P0410 and the P0418, the P0412 was already disabled from the factory by default, and then further down the list P1415 and P1416 get disabled as well

[Gregski]

don't be afraid to use long file names you can go as long as 256 characters I think, the days of the eight.three are long gone

[Gregski]

flash the PCM and have a beer

[Gregski]

HP Tuners - Part V - Turn Off the Air Pump.

OK so we are back to Series 1. I know we are going back and forth between disabling codes (in Series 2) and turning off actual components but that is deliberate, I want us all to see what we are doing and why we are doing it.

Why bother, why go through all of this? Why not just unplug a component and be done with it, well cause it's like this, imagine you come home from work on Monday night and you just want to have a beer and watch the football game, but then your wife says honey, I am running late do you mind starting dinner, ok, now you get to have a beer, try to watch the game, while you cook dinner, ok, then grandma returns the two year old from day care and until your wife gets home you gotta watch her too, ok, now you get to have a beer, sort of watch the game, do your best to cook dinner, and kinda watch the kid?

See where I am going with this analogy/metaphor? The point is you want the PCM to PCM the engine, not the EGR, not the Air Pump, not the AC, not the traction control, and any other components that are no longer there. Why? because it takes away from the computing power, more specifically it now takes longer for the PCM to make the short term fuel trim adjustments and long term fuel adjustments, and adjustments based on the MAF or the O2 sensor feedback. Yeah it may be milliseconds but we are not talking about super computing power, that poor old PCM is 20 years old, I bet the iPhone watch has more processing power than it does, so every bit helps, I did not mean to sound condescending I was trying to make a point in a funny entertaining way.

So in this article we will actually disable the Air Pump, in addition to suppressing the diagnostic codes like we did in the last article. Keep in mind HP Tuners was developed by a third party and not by General Motors so in some cases they have an Enable / Disable button, in other cases you turn things on and off by sort of tricking the system. You do that by entering numbers or values that will never be reached as in this case the Air Pump is controlled by ECT, Engine Coolant Temperature. As it sits at 36 degrees right now, the Air Pump will not come on until the engine warms up hotter than 36*. So to make it never turn on we set it to 284* (Top Tip: when ever you don't know what values to put in the box, simply gaze at the bottom of the window you are in while hovering your mouse over the field or button you have questions about: in our case it says the values we can enter here fall between -40 and 285, well I tried 285 and it didn't like it so we settle for 284)

DISCLAIMER and I hate Disclaimers: We are doing this in the context of guys doing engine swaps into old Chevy trucks where we did not even install the air pump, I am not suggesting you turn off the Air Pump on your daily 1999-2007 trucks as there may be SMOG implications, etc.

1. Again we start in the comfort of our own home, we fire up our laptop and launch the Editor. Open the file we saved in Step 3 of Section D. (Our last saved file is always our starting point).

2. Make changes in the Editor, this time we will make changes only to the Air Pump settings found under Engine\General tab. Enter 284 in the box next to Disable ECT. This means do not turn on the Air Pump until the engine coolant temp reaches 284 degrees. (Additional instructions with each pic)

3. Save the changes you made to a new file and call it something like "09 - Disabled Air Pump"

4. Now you get to move the operation to your truck, hook up your HP Tuner to the OBDII port and then your USB cable to your laptop, turn the key to the ON position, launch the Editor program, and simply write the new changes to the PCM.

Note: sometimes you have to write the entire tune file to the PCM, sometimes it is perfectly happy with only writing what's changed, more on this later.

More words with each pic, honestly this guy likes to hide some gold nuggets in these sections:

[Gregski]

typical click bait, the Air Pump

[Gregski]

if you followed along you know we are beating this old VCM Editor horse to death, but it's worth it, I promise

[Gregski]

some feature sets in HP Tuners have an actual Enable / Disable setting, but some do not. In this case we disable the Air Pump by setting the Engine Coolant temp so high that the Air Pump will never come on.

[Gregski]

if you ever don't know what a button does just look at the bottom of the screen, there's usually an explanation, some are intuitive some are Google worthy

[Gregski]

HP Tuners did a good job of giving you the range of values that can go into each field, though sometimes slight adjustments are necessary as in our case where the box will only take 284 instead of 285 without being pesky about it

[Gregski]

as always we use our own prefix to index the order of files: 01, 02, ... 09 then name the file so that we know what we did in it six months from now

[Gregski]

by now we can chew gum and flash our PCMs, but hey we're not bragging

[JMac11]

When time permits, can you show how to adjust VSS input? I have the 8000 ppm sending unit, CPU thinks I am cruising about 4 mph on the highway

[Gregski]

Originally Posted by JMac11

When time permits, can you show how to adjust VSS input? I have the 8000 ppm sending unit, CPU thinks I am cruising about 4 mph on the highway

Did you already use the tire size wizard to enter your actual tire size and gear ratio? Remember lots of settings are relative, meaning they effect/rely on others. What gauge cluster are you ronnin'?

[loosenutz]

Agreed, use the tire wizard. I'm a math guy and did all the calculations myself and it still came out about 10% off. Must be something the computer does that I'm not aware of. When I used the wizard, it came out perfect. Reads exactly the same as my GPS.

Originally Posted by Gregski

Did you already use the tire size wizard to enter your actual tire size and gear ratio? Remember lots of settings are relative, meaning they effect/rely on others. What gauge cluster are you ronnin'?

[Flubyu]

Great information here! Lets keep this rolling, any info on enabling e-fans?

[Gregski]

Originally Posted by Flubyu

Great information here! Lets keep this rolling, any info on enabling e-fans?

thank you, wow - what a great topic for the advanced series, in the meantime please check out the docs or ask the question on this very active FaceBook Group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2678...925/?ref=share

[Gregski]

HP Tuners Section E Disable the Fuel Level Sensor Codes

Not another one of these, this is so boring I just want to make 600 hp on the dyno, ha ha.

I hope that if you find these articles boring by now, you take that as a good sign and this is becoming second nature to you. We learn through repetition, and I purposely did not bundle disabling all the codes into one article so that future Swappers can find a specific article easier, plus can you imagine me rambling on about disabling a dozen or so different sensor codes in one article??? these articles are too wordy as it is, lol

In prior posts I talk about the two schools of thought on how to go about disabling codes. Just like in the last article, we watch the PCM throw a code (this time because we did not use the OEM fuel tank) and then we go after it. I should have used HP Tuners as my Code Reader this being an HP Tuners tutorial and all, but I wasn't thinking about doing the tutorial at that time so I caught the P0463 code using my Insight Edge CTS2 digital display (pronounced: "expensive"), but any OBDII code reader will find the same codes if you don't own HP Tuners and are just following along for understandability.

On my 2001 Siera donor PCM there were six Fuel Level Sensor codes, your PCM may be a little bit different:

P0461 Fuel Level Sensor A Circuit Range/Performance

P0462 Fuel Level Sensor A Circuit Low

P0463 Fuel Level Sensor A Circuit High

P1431 Fuel Level Sensor 2 Circuit Performance

P1432 Fuel Level Sensor 2 Circuit Low Voltage

P1433 Fuel Level Sensor 2 Circuit High Voltage

[Rant] Not sure if GM did that and HP Tuners is just pulling the descriptions, or if HP Tuners dropped the ball, but my OCD is trippin' on the fact that they went from Sensor A to Sensor 2, which should have been either Sensor A and Sensor B or Sensor 1 and Sensor 2 type of thing, ha ha, and the inconsistency in the descriptions, where are my meds? [/Rant]

Now let's look at the Black Magic that it takes to disable these codes, we have two controls:

• SES Enable
• Error Mode

If it was up to me I would break it up into a third control so it would look more like this:

• SES (Enable / Disable)
  
• MIL (MIL On First Error, MIL on Second Error, No MIL Light)
  
• Report Code (On / Off)

1. Again we start in the comfort of our own home, we fire up our laptop and launch the Editor. Open the file we saved in Step 3 of Part V. (Our last saved file is always our starting point).

2. Make changes in the Editor, this time we will make changes only to the Fuel Level Sensor codes under Engine Diag \ DTCs. Refer to the cheat sheet below and Disable the SES on these and set the MIL to No Error Reported, some may be disabled already by default:

P0461

P0462

P0463

P1431

P1432

P1433

3. Save the changes you made to a new file and call it something like "10 - Disabled Fuel Level Codes"

4. Now you get to move the operation to your truck, hook up your HP Tuner to the OBDII port and then your USB cable to your laptop, turn the key to the ON position, launch the Editor program, and simply write the new changes to the PCM.

Note: sometimes you have to write the entire tune file to the PCM, sometimes it is perfectly happy with only writing what's changed, more on this later.

More words with each pic:

[Gregski]

Seriously bro? you are showing us a pic of a stock fuel tank! Awesome

[Gregski]

I forgot to disable the P0463 code and sure enuff the PCM complained about the Fuel Level Sensor.

[Gregski]

You are going to throw this code if you are not running the stock fuel tank.

[Gregski]

another day another VCM Edit

[Gregski]

there are three more codes to disable further down the list

[Gregski]

we keep the file names going with something that tells us what we did in that tune file

[Gregski]

doing small changes at a time is key

[weedoublewide]

Originally Posted by Gregski

my advice to a 20 year younger self would be, digest / consume all the free information you can before dropping any coin on books or videos etc. these days there is so much free info out there, you just have to look, two words for you: Forums, Forums. Find a specific forum for you vehicle, or for your engine, or jump on the HP Tuners forum, cover yourself up in some thick skin, as some guys are jerks, and ask a bunch of specific questions, filter out all the BS and build away.

I have not used the tuning school materials so I can't recommend them.

I would suggest you consume as many YouTube videos as you can, but don't watch 12 hours worth in one day, watch an hour every other day, know what I'm saying, let your brain rest.

Here are some smart dudes that I enjoy watching. Oh, just because a video is not exactly about what you need, watch it anyway it may give you the foundation you need to build on, then you will find they all have 70% the same content, but it's that last 30% where you find the gold nuggets.

Yes I've watched some of these videos and barely understood 10% the first time, that's ok, there is a lot of information, so grab a cold one and watch them a few times, it's all good we all learn at different speeds, I applaud you for taking this on rather than [ahem] gaming, ha ha

In closing you will find a lot more dudes are doing write ups on what you are doing than what I am teaching, because everyone wants to run before they can walk, ha ha.

Mega Mechatronics
Engine Tuning 101 - Part 1 - Intro, Lambda, Wideband

I wish I was 20 something again lol, I'm what you call a late bloomer going back to college, still 30 years young.

is there anything to log when one is trying to start for the first time? I'm only firing on three cylinders. Coils are good and each injector is getting pulse(YAY NOID LIGHT).I need a new set of fuel injectors(3 are bad 37 ohms).

I'm trying to learn this VCM scanner and use it as a troubleshooting tool.