ECU Settings

Browse and edit every setting and table in your calibration file

The tuning pages each work on one table — VE, ignition, boost, idle. The ECU Settings page opens up everything else: the full contents of your calibration file, organised the way your ECU's own tuning software organises it, with a search box over the top.

Finding a setting

The panel on the left is the whole calibration. Leave the search box empty and it is a browsable tree — categories at the top level, then each settings group, then the individual settings inside it. Tables appear as items directly under their category.

Type in the search box and the panel becomes a list of candidates instead. Each result tells you three things: its name, what level it sits at (Category, Group, Setting or Table), and which group it belongs to — so a result called simply "Mode" is never ambiguous.

Search matches on the whole path, not just the item's own name. Searching boost duty finds the boost duty table even though its name in the file may be "Open Loop Duty(1)" — the word "boost" is matched against its category. All the words you type have to appear somewhere in the path, so adding a word narrows the results.

Some ECUs hold a very large number of settings — a MaxxECU save has over thirteen thousand. Selecting a whole category on those shows the first few hundred and says so; open the group you want on the left, or search, to reach the rest.

Editing settings

Select a setting (or a whole group) and the right-hand pane lists them in a table with three columns:

• Setting — the parameter name, exactly as your ECU software calls it. Hover for the manufacturer's description, the allowed range and the units.
• Map Value — what the calibration file on disk currently holds.
• Current Value — the value in use, including any unsaved edits.

Settings with a fixed set of choices appear as a drop-down showing the real option names ("Injection and Ignition Cut"), not the numbers stored in the file. Everything else is typed in directly. Anything the calibration marks read-only is greyed out.

Any setting you have changed is shown in bold with a • beside it in the list on the left, all the way up through its group and category, and the header keeps a running count of unsaved changes. Right-click a row to revert it to the map value, or use Revert All in the header to undo everything on the page at once.

Editing tables

Select a table and you get the values in a grid you can type into. A 3-D table (RPM against load) is shown as a heat-mapped grid with its axes as the row and column headers. A 2-D table is shown as an axis column beside a value column, with a graph next to it.

On the graph you can drag the points directly:

• Drag a point up or down to change its value.
• Alt + drag also moves it left and right, changing the axis breakpoint.
• Shift + drag moves that point and every point to the right of it together.

The grid and the graph stay in step, and right-clicking the grid offers Revert table to map values. Editing a table that one of the tuning pages also uses — the VE table, for instance — updates that page too.

Select cells in the grid and press = (the Apply trim formula hotkey) to trim them all at once — +10, *1.2, -5, /2, or a full expression such as x*1.05+1 where x is the cell's current value. The same thing is on the grid's right-click menu. On a 2-D table the axis column can be trimmed too, unless the calibration does not store an axis for it.

The rest of the table shortcuts work here as well, on the selected cells: Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V to copy and paste, Ctrl+W and Ctrl+Q to interpolate a straight line down or across the selection, W / Q to nudge every selected cell up or down, and Shift+Return to set them all to one number. Interpolation follows the table's own axis, so unevenly spaced breakpoints come out as a straight line rather than an evenly stepped one. A paste that runs off the edge of the table says how much it could not place, and the axis column is left alone where the calibration does not store one.

Some ECUs store a list of values without storing an axis for it — the pairing lives in their tuning software. Those are shown against a point number, greyed out, so you can edit the values but not the numbering.

Comparing two calibrations

Compare… in the header asks for a second calibration file and lists everything that differs between it and the map you have loaded: settings with their two values side by side, and tables summarised by how many cells differ and by how far.

Items that exist in only one of the two files are listed separately and hidden by default — across ECU firmware versions most of those are simply renames rather than real differences. Tick the box to include them.

Saving a group as a preset

With a settings group selected, Save Group as Preset stores all of its parameters as a Map Preset under a name you choose. You can then apply that preset to other calibrations from the Map Presets page. This is ME-only, matching the Map Presets feature itself.

What each ECU exposes

Every setting in your calibration is here, whichever ECU it came from. What varies is how much each format can tell you about those settings — the words behind a drop-down, the units, the valid range — because some manufacturers keep that description in the calibration file and others keep it in their tuning software.

Where a format cannot describe something, the page says so at the top rather than leaving you to work it out from a screen of bare numbers.