Haltech Elite Megathread

[NitroDann]

Hi,

Its been suggested to make this thread seeing as how I get some requests for info regarding it, and now that some cars have one. In post 2 (below) I will copy and paste the post which led to this request.



The Elite is the most high end ECU most people would consider fitting to an MX5, and has a tonne of OEM style features and a really excellent GUI for tuning it. Right now there isnt any support documentation, and no official support for MX5's at all.
I have fitted one to Emilys SE, and another to Juicy's SE, and both times have had to work forwards from incomplete patch harness's, tune, and base settings, both times getting results which are basically outstanding.

This makes me the only person to install an Elite into any MX5 apart from Haltech themselves and has given me the opportunity to understand the ecu from a fresh perspective and incorporate 'The NitroDann Way' of MX5 performance tuning into the MX5/Elite combo.

The Elite has a tonne of features which are hard to explain in laymans terms via a forum but I can list some of the notable things that I have achieved in terms of the end results. Both cars have used 450+hp capable injectors. The recent car started, idled and drove spectacularly straight off the base tune which I have kept from previous experience, this means that future cars can have the same results in terms of street manners and performance right off the bat given that the ecu is coupled with the matching patch harness, map and injectors. Its now been tested on SE setups which are bolt on only like most people have and built engine, aftermarket turbo kit.

Oem starting from cold and hot.
Oem throttle response even 1 second after a dead cold start.
Better than oem smoothness in light and heavy acceleration.
Oem throttle feel.
Boost and torque control the same way I do it on a megasquirt, ask the guys who have these cars what this means.
Oem fuel economy.
Oem behaviour when fans and a/c turns on.

The Elite also can control the oem emissions gear, has long term trims for timing and fuel just like a new mercedes, has long term trims for flex fuel just like a new volvo or other euro, and has a much more comprehensive set of long term trims for E85, meaning that not only does it do flex fuel non linearly (like a megasquirt3 can) it will automatically take your base linear tune and learn and remember the fuel curve so every percentage of ethanol is covered, and you dont have to pay a tuner to do it for you.

Long term timing trim means that it remembers when you car had a little bit of knock and actively saves a new timing map to ensure it never happens again in the future.

I am also happy to discuss the Elite compared to other ECU's I have tried.

So far I hugely recommend it for people with SE's who want to decimate worked V8s but still let their daughter drive it to uni if she needs to. Its an expensive bit of gear but a one time, everything is amazing and your wife wont even notice kind of experience might be worth it for some.

Feel free to ask any questions you please.

Dann

[NitroDann]

Haltech Elite:

After a pretty long day working out some bugs and inconsistencies between this one and the last install I did, and after a long talk with one of the tech guys I've found a few things.

The MX5 is not officially supported by the Elite in any shape.

The only Elites that have ever been installed into SE's are the ones I have done, this shocked me because Ive heard reports of others.

Haltech has no patch harness in their system for any mx5/elite combos. Any and all harness's are currently hand made based on notes and as a result no 2 harnesses are the same.

The Elite ECU has reprogrammable outputs and inputs, which means you can swap many of the wires in the harness and then you can just tell the software that you swapped them and it will work, this means that the process for building a harness for this ecu is vastly different to older generation ecus...

Example:

In an older ecu it might have 20 pins on the ecu to connect to the cars loom.

Pin1: Crank trigger input
Pin2: Coolant temp input
Pin3: Thermofan output etc etc

In the above example when you make a harness for an MX5 you MUST connect the fan wire to pin3, because its predesignated. With an elite you connect the fan wire anywhere and let the ecu know.

IE: Pin1: generic output
**Solder thermofan output wire to pin1**
"Haltech software, pin1 is for turning the fan on!"

So you can make a patch harness for an Elite a million different ways and as long as the software matches it will work.

The implication is that you have to have the right tune to go with the right harness, which means that the harness guy has to create the right tune for you and you start from that point.


I didnt know MOST of this previously, and I assume nor did anyone here. What it means is that the next Elite I do I will actually make the patch harness myself from my own patch diagram, to suit my own base map, and the cars will work perfectly first go.

Whats nice to know is that I actually was given a generic harness and tune twice, and both times I was able to create a correct harness and tune and get the cars to run excellently.

I guess the next step is working out if people are interested in Elite plug and play setups which include a PnP harness with PnP boost control and the injectors/map to go with it and run your car like stock but with tonnes more power and drveability with almost no tuning. I have the harness info, the ECU side of the harness info, pinout combination that works with that harness, and a base map that works flawlessly like stock with a specific set of off the shelf large injectors.


In the end the Elite is an amazing product that can run so many stock and better than stock functions in such an amazingly smooth and precise way, and the frustration has come from misinformation both propagated through the community, and between myself and the exceptionally busy guys at haltech.
Again Ill remind people that Haltech is a really small company who has only 6 technical guys in the whole business, so to be able to get one on the phone for an hour this afternoon is great and I really appreciate it. However this had led to some frustrations, and misdirection. There is no plug and play elite, and so far Im the only guy who has managed to get these into SE's. But there could be others who can get these fantastic results, I have all of the notes and info required to build plug and play kits.


Dann

[Apu]

Oooh...interesting! I remember how you used to advocate Megasquirt!

What you need to do now is work out a cost for install and tune!

[NitroDann]

I love the megasquirt ECU, it certainly has its place in the MX5 world, but for all of the features one might want in a really really tidy factory turbo car, only the MS3 can do it, and thats a FAIRLY untrodden path, without local support.

Dann

[bartmanftw]

So how does it compare to a MS3x? Better or about the same? Don't hold back on the technical jargon

[Nevyn72]

Posted in another thread before I saw this one......

I guess the next step is working out if people are interested in Elite plug and play setups which include a PnP harness with PnP boost control and the injectors/map to go with it and run your car like stock but with tonnes more power and drveability with almost no tuning. I have the harness info, the ECU side of the harness info, pinout combination that works with that harness, and a base map that works flawlessly like stock with a specific set of off the shelf large injectors.

I would be interested in 'package' although how adaptable is it to differences in the typical 'bolt-on' additions to an SE?

Would a further formal tune still be required to get the best from the new setup?
Would you need to have a WBO2 fitted?

[bartmanftw]

I'd say it'd be pretty silly to spend that much on an ECU and not buy a wideband so you can make sure the fueling is correct.

[Nevyn72]

I'd say it'd be pretty silly to spend that much on an ECU and not buy a wideband so you can make sure the fueling is correct.

Partly curious to know if the Haltech requires one for 'self tuning' purposes.

Also academic in my case as I already have an Innovate LC-2 fitted even though I don't have an ECU yet........

[NitroDann]

So how does it compare to a MS3x? Better or about the same? Don't hold back on the technical jargon

The ms3 and Elite have a similar featureset in many ways however the Elite has excellent software in terms of functionality, the diagnostics tools read themselves to you. For example, the MS3 can show you every gauge imaginable and if you find the 'fuel injector duty cycle" one and correlate that with your stall condition then great you just figured out that the ecu isnt sending fuel for some reason, the elite has a box that is labeled "engine protection" and inside that box it says "Fuel cut" and now you can just look at the conditions required for that protection and you know exactly what caused it. As an example.

In terms of what makes the Elite better for the owner of the car, it has things like transient spark adjustment.

Typically you have a spark table which the ecu uses to look up how much spark advance to give the car, which is set by the tuner using a dyno. The ecu checks the Manifold Air Pressure sensor (MAP sensor) and the RPM, and it then looks at the table and it goes, "Hmm, so we are at 3000rpm, and 7psi, we need 15* timing and then it sends 15* to the engine on the next cycle (the very next revolution the engine does).
However it may go from 5* to 20* in one revolution and this makes the throttle feel sensitive and jerky, which is great when you are blipping the car in neutral but no good if you want to change speed in a carpark. The Elite knows you are in gear and is moving and you can tell the elite how quickly it can go from 5* to 15* timing. And its not a single setting such as "1* timing change allowed per revolution". Its on a 3D map giving the right timing aggressiveness at each RPM. All of this is correct and has been done on my maps now, and things like this is the difference between a car with a good tune and a car that you dont know has been tuned.

Additionally the long term fuel trims and timing trims, those arent a single setting like 3% richer, its a whole table where it adjusts every cell on the table just like a tuner does, but even more than that its not just one table, if you are on E85 its 32 tables spread out between 98 octane tables all the way to 85% ethanol tables, timing too.

And a table which remember if its only affected in this way on a cold day, and one for a hot day, and 14 more in between. It goes on. Haltech took a really powerful piece of hardware and then wrote every map that you could dream of into it, which you cant do with slow ecu;s and without a lot of memory on the ecu.

When you tune a stock EVO ecu or an NC, it doesnt have a fuel map, and then an overall trim for coolant temperature applied to that map, it has a fuel map for every 5c in coolant and a fuel map for every 5c in intake air temp.

So there is a 0cfuel/0cAIT map and a 5c/0c map, and a 10c/0c map and so on, and a corresponding set of maps the other way around, and a set of maps for different barometric conditions. This is why some early NC's with flash tunes failed, because the guys in the USA had found they could alter some code and the fuel map would change so they made a tune for the supercharger, that was fine in their 1000m elevated car because they werent tuning THE fuel map, they were tuning -A- fuel map, the summer temperature 1000m elevation map, they had left the map that the car uses at sea level untouched.

Dann

Dann

[NitroDann]

Posted in another thread before I saw this one......

I guess the next step is working out if people are interested in Elite plug and play setups which include a PnP harness with PnP boost control and the injectors/map to go with it and run your car like stock but with tonnes more power and drveability with almost no tuning. I have the harness info, the ECU side of the harness info, pinout combination that works with that harness, and a base map that works flawlessly like stock with a specific set of off the shelf large injectors.

I would be interested in 'package' although how adaptable is it to differences in the typical 'bolt-on' additions to an SE?

It would be sent out slightly detuned in boost, and the closed loop trims would make sure it worked well on cruise. However I wouldnt give any guarantees without it seing a tuner.

Would a further formal tune still be required to get the best from the new setup?
This offer can only work with a specific map, harness, pinout settings, and a boost valve setup and injectors that would be supplied together, this means that it will be right to within the tolerances of how your air filter works compared to the next guys, basically identical. However as I said above, its basically a flash tune with incredible hardware and capability in this state and no one would recommend a customer never saw a dyno with the car, however the issue people have isnt getting a guy to check that the mixture and boost is safe, it has always been and still is getting an ecu and tune into the car that runs it like factory.
So yes, it would need a wideband plugged into it.

Would you need to have a WBO2 fitted?

[Regie]

ABS issues in the NC's?

You will be a well publicised man if you could sort out that issue

[NitroDann]

Fill me in Re: ABS

[gslender]

Without degenerating into a pissing match, the MS3 Pro and MS PNP Pro series (already plug-n-play for MX5 SE models) all have many of the features mentioned above. The input/output reassignment, transient spark maps, gear/speed control maps, etc.

Personally not convinced the extra complexity of countless tables and tables is a good thing. Reminds me of the "how big is your tuning table" argument where if you use smart algorithms to calculate between load points, you rarely need anything bigger than 12 bins. So having 16x16 table is more than ever enough.

End of the day, if your budget is big enough and keeping a tuner handy is ok, then it probably doesn't mater how complex or more expensive it is.

Dann, maybe one day we can do an ECU swap and you can get your hands on the latest PNP MS3 Pro units. They're leaps ahead of the last MS2 PNP kits you've been using.

G


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[NitroDann]

Literally the last MX5 I tuned is a flex fuelled MS3 built by Rev. So while I havnt used a current MS3Pro, I can only assume similarity?

As a good example for the extra tables being useable, on the MS when I tuned flex fuel it could do a non linear flex fuel algorithm, however it had no provision for the ecu tuning that, I would have literally had to dyno the car 6 times with different fuel blends manually poured in. Is that the case for the pro?

What options for engine protection does the MS3 pro have? Does it have long term automatic timing trims? Will it drive the OEM scantool fault codes?

Genuine questions because I have no idea based on the few MS3's Ive tuned. A lot of these decisions comes down to "It says it can but who has done one on my model and what support is available?".

Remember how many phone calls and emails I made to you looking for help because I cant call the guys who make MS?

[ManiacLachy]

Seriously. Argh! Dann has quoted me (quite reasonable I think) and I'm formulating a plan to get the car to him. Just need to find a way to get it past the gate-keeper.