Hi crew, can anyone tell me about the Holley systems ie dominator or terminator etc. I have a turbo car I built, had professionally tuned and it's been running great for 5 years. But now I want more. I want to install a different cam and put more boost to it. Question is do either of these units self tune for boost? So if I installed a cam would it tune for it and such? I've read alot about these units but I want someone who has one to tell me about it. What else can I do with It? It says you can adjust timing and fuel for boost I think I read. Now is that where you set a target afr and it tunes for it? I guess what I'm trying to get is a unit that will pay for itself over time. A tune is 700 bucks a rip.. if I monkey with the car twice there's the Holley tuner that's paid for itself. Thanks all

 

Self tuning is a misnomer. It will tune itself well enough to cruise the street. Full throttle is another matter. That, especially on a turbo setup, needs to be tuned either via HP Tuners or a tuning shop

 

Two things, The Holley system is awesome.....but you still need to know how to tune.
Yes you can put your desired AFR ratio and it will fill in the fuel tables for you but there is a lot more to the rest of the tune.
The only real difference between the HP and the Dominator are, The Dominator will do DBW and transmission control. The Dominator also have a lot more inputs and outputs. As far as what it can do, You're only limited by your imagination and ability. Boost control can be configured multiple ways, Boost by gear/RPM/Speed/Time and so on.
I could spend hours going everything I know and still not cover half of it. I always joke around and tell people it does just about anything you want except make toast....only because I haven't tried that yet.

 

That's not true at all, A dyno doesn't replicate what you'll see on the street or strip unless you only plan on doing pulls from 3,000 to redline at full throttle, You can get it close on the dyno but it's not realistic to spend hours on the dyno dialing it in when it will still need real world driving to get it 100%

Hp tuners doesn't work with the Holley system

 

I didn't mean a dyno. I meant a tuner who will handle most street situations

 

A person in the seat tweaking the driveablilty portion of tune is helpful but not absolutely needed if you know basic tuning, The Holley system isn't 100% self tuning but allows you to set AFR ratio at Idle/Part Throttle and under load so if a person knows what they are doing setting it up then that part is covered.
The hardest part is initial setup/start up and idle tuning, Once you get it started and idling well enough to drive and let it populate the fuel tables it actually gets you pretty close and you can tweak it from there, If it's a high dollar max effort deal I would let the pro's handle the initial tuning on the dyno and then do the driveability tweaking yourself but that's a big...."IF" you have the basic understanding of both tuning and the Holley software.

The biggest downfall to not using a dyno is that it's not safe to do full pulls on a high powered car on the street and not being able to adjust timing until you stop seeing increases and backing it off and knowing it's safe. I tuned my LSA LY6 on the street myself and it was actually easy but without a dyno or going to the track with a handful of spark plugs I only know that my timing is safe but don't know if I'm leaving power on the table.

 

That all makes sense. I bought Greg banishs tuning book, read it once and was still like " I have no clue how to tune". I have tuned all types of carburetor things, quite well. I understand what needs to happen. It's the how for me.. how do I adjust the fuel where i need to via these numbers and cells. Would I have enough knowledge to tune with the Holley unit? I think I might. I would start timing very conservative, do some pulls add timing til I saw it knock on the datalog, take some timing off etc. I think I could get it to perform decent. Not all out like you could on a dyno tuning for max power but I don't need max.. I'm also gonna be running methanol so that would certainly add a cushion from me blowing my **** up

 

Holley EFI doesn't self tune, that's the big myth in all this. It just speeds up populating the fuel map, that's all. You still have to put the work into the tune. And all the background engineering the factory worked out to make your car run smooth, start smooth, drive smooth is now up to you. There's really no shortcut. A professional tuner doesn't have your car long enough to work out all the drivability quirks. You're going to have to put time in it yourself no matter what.

Some people figure this stuff out fast, some people don't. I knew nothing so I paid a professional to get it idling, driving, and do all the WOT and part throttle tuning. WORTH EVERY PENNY. Then I refined idle and sorted out the low-rpm drivability and cold start on my own. I just kept at it and increased my dictionary of curse words and eventually figured it out.

I'm not sure about a boosted engine, but I know for a naturally aspirated engine there is NO REASON to ever get into knock because optimal timing for max torque occurs waaaaay before knock happens. Advancing timing beyond max torque is pointless and you'd have to advance on the order of +5° to induce knock. The beauty of tuning on an eddy current dyno (such as a Mustang dyno) is you can hold the engine at constant speed at any load and find max torque and fill out your entire part-throttle timing map in about 15 minutes. Not going to happen with an inertia dyno. And very difficult and time consuming on the street.

 

If you can tune a carburetor then then the Holley won't be that difficult fuel wise, Like I said earlier, You tell it what AFR you are looking for at idle, Part throttle/full throttle and cruise using MAP/RPM graph, So at idle or cruise with high vacuum you can lean it out and as load increase up the table you tell it the target AFR you want. Then It uses the O2 sensor to populate the tables for you as it learns, So it's like having a carb that adjusts the jets by itself on the fly.
The part that you'll work on most is driveability, Instead of a choke it uses Air temperature/ Water temperature table that you can adjust to compensate for cold starts or cold climates. So if it see's it's 40 degrees outside you can add a percentage of fuel to compensate for the cool air, This is also a graph so as temp increases you can set it to lessen the enrichment.
It uses an acceleration enrichment table instead of accelerator pump squirter change /accelerator cam rate change. It can seem complicated but once you learn how a carb setting relates to the software setting it gets easier. It's actually so much easier than tuning with a laptop because you can save a copy of your tune then make changes and if it's worse or you made so many changes that you're not sure what went wrong....you simply go back to your old tune. Holley has a decent library of tunes that you can use as a base for your application, Say you have a lightly modified 5.3 or a turbo 5.3 on E85 ....look in the library and pick the one that is closest to your build, It won't be exact but it will give you a base to start off of. You change a few things like injector size and such but it's gets you in the ball park. There are quite a few settings that I didn't even touch because they are already set close enough that once I was up and running and tuned everything else I didn't feel the need to mess with them.
The main focus for me is cold start/acceleration enrichment so it starts easy when cold and idle tuning that consists of Idle spark and IAC ramp down control. With those you can smooth out the idle with fuel and timing settings and the IAC ramp down needs set so after you let off the throttle it will come back down to idle fast enough to make the car easier to drive but not so fast that it dies when you let off the throttle suddenly. Basically you're setting it so the IAC opens fast enough to stop the engine for dropping to an rpm lower than your desired idle and letting it stall but not opening so soon that rpms drop to slowly making the car want keep moving.

 

Ok that makes perfect sense. I'm gonna be doing alot more research on it, I just wanted to know what it can do. Which turns out to be alot apparently. I'll prob read that book again and probably a third time too

 

If you haven't already, You can download the software and play around with it to get familiar with it. If you're not sure what something does there is a "Help?" symbol at the top you can click on it and move your pointer to the area you want to know more about and click again and it will take you to the area of the manual that covers that portion.

 

So I'll add my $0.02. I have had the Terminator X since it came out. I have a NA cammed LS6 in an 84 Corvette with a 4L80e. The self tuning is all you need for a street car. If you're not interested in gaining every last bit of power then turn the self learning on and just drive the car. It will adjust the fuel table only. It won't make any changes to timing. The timing table that comes pre configured on the Holley ECU is a little conservative. But again in a street car it's not that bad.

Most people who have issues with the Holley (myself included) have it with other functions. I still can't get the Holley to control an IAC properly. One minuet it's fine and the next it commands 100%. The last time it did it to me I was at a traffic light and it almost pushed me through. So I used the Holley billet block off plate and set the throttle blade opening to the point were I don't need an IAC. Then I played with the timing at idle so it won't stall. It works ok. If I was driving the car in cold weather I might care more.

I started out with a 4l60e. The Holley let me swap out to a 4L80e with no issue. I just told it what trans I had and it did the rest. So if you have a street car and you like to swap out parts all the time the thing is amazing. If you need to make max power you need to have the thing tuned.

 

if you like to "tinker" with your car Holley is awesome. If you plan to go co2 control or change fuels in the future, suck it up and get the dominator and learn the software.
I'm on my 3rd system. Have the terminator hp and dominator in different cars, all depends on your future goals. It does have a little learning curve but even the 50 plus crowd can tune with the holley.

 

Turbo 5.3 here, TermX, has worked perfect since day one....the auto generated timing table from the wizard for boost is insane and would window your block on the first hit....other than that....between the forums, the holley tuning instructions, mine fires up cold or hot like a new car and all works as intended. I control my meth kit through it (simple on/off switch with rpm/throttle % requirements) and use the holley/Dakota didgital gauge interface for my dakota gauges and that works like a charm too.
( I also use a laptop to tune it via the holley software). If you need more I/O's or control more intricate stuff, the HP-Dominator might be what you need. Also I do beieve the Dominator has more then one choice of WB o2 you can use. TermX only use the bosh 4.9 type.