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{multithumb default} I have written on the forums about the install of a Wideband Commander on the VMax for measurement purposes. With the arrival of aftermarket exhaust and performance systems, there is a need to measure and adjust the electronic fuel injection of the 2009 VMax.
Exhaust systems like the UFO 4 into 1 race exhaust, their cat eliminator or the member made X-Pipe setup are starting to show the potential of the 2009 VMax. All of these setups require increased amounts of fuel to compensated and leverage the extra flow these systems provide.
I am currently testing the X-Pipe setup and recent dyno testing has shown that the majority of the fuel map leans out beyond the point where top horsepower can be produced by the engine. Equipted with the WBC, detailed runtime analysis is possible that aids in the creation of custom fuel maps.
The Wideband Commander does the measurements. Now what?
In order to take measurements and convert them into an adjusted fuel map for a motorcycle like the Yamaha/Star VMax, either a new ECU (no the Star 'Race' ECU does no such thing) or an addon fuel controller is needed to adjust the pre-programmed fuel map of the stock ECU.
Since I have been using Dynojet products for as long as I have been doing fuel injected Yamaha bikes, the choice was pretty clear: A Power Commander. Not so much that it is anything special, it has not failed me once, has been reliable to me for many years on various bikes and most importantly, I have all the software and tools in my possession to make the most out of it.
Unfortunately Dynojet has not yet released a Power Commander and the pre announcements of the PCV - while sounding good - might not become reality over night.
As of this article, they have not gotten an R&D bike to develop their PCV setup for the VMax.
Doesn't matter. I really don't need a PCV, which is only smaller than the PCIII and not too many extra features I care about and space is not an issue. So off I went today and purchased a PCIII USB - locally for a steal. The PCIII USBs are being discounted due to the PCV coming out soon. You can find them for as low as 200 bucks.
But wait a minute. There is no PCIII USB for the 2009 VMax available! Well that is true, but it really doesn't matter. In reality all PCIII USBs are pretty much the same, with the big difference being the wrie harness that makes them plug and play for various setups. I ended up getting one for a 2004 Yamaha YZFR1. 4 cylinders and 4 injectors, that's all I care about.
Turned out to be the perfect purchase, great deal and I have the service manuals and therefore the electronics schema for the 2004/2005 R1 in my shop.
This project is not for the faint of heart. If you are scared cutting and soldering wires, you should leave it to somebody with experience doing that. If you are good with electronics on the other hand, you will find this almost dead simple. With both service manuals in place I was quickly able to match the connector positions of the 2004 R1 PCIII USB to the proper wiring on the 2009 VMax.
Yamaha threw a little bit of a wrinkle into the VMax as it used the same colors for the Acceleration Position Sensor (APS) and the Throttle Position Sensor (TPS). They have learned from the past and are now using dual sensors that provide two identical feeds back to the ECU. That way they can easily detect TPS failure and even compensate for it. About those colors: the APS measures the riders input for the YCCT. Wide Open Throttle (WOT) produces 100% signal. The TPS on the other side is the measurement of the butterflies, how wide they are open. As YCCT is a ride by wire system, there will be differences between the rider input and the actual throttle position.
As good example is the ability of the engine to idle in 5th gear at around 1000-1500 rpm rolling at a slow yet steady speed and being able to suddenly go to Wide Open Throttle (WOT). Any none Ride by Wire Engine will bark at you and create violent shakes, potentially even die. Not so the YCCT system. It 'knows' that at those low rpms, 100% throttle is not an option. It knows the limits of the engine design and will gradually open the butterflies, attempting to always produce maximum possible power.
This behavior is important to understand as wiring the Power Commander to the wrong input would make it unusable. The Power Commander does not care at all what the rider input is. It needs to know where the butterflies are, relative to idle. Therefore the PCIII need its signal from the TPS and not from the APS sensor. That's where Yamaha threw the wrench between our legs. Both sensors have on black and one white output running back to the ECU. No so nice.
You can either disassemble the air box and dig down into the the top of the engines to get to those sensors and trace the wires back to the ECU or you use a simple Voltmeter to measure the signal. Here is how you do it: Pick on color, in my case white. You have two of them on the left ECU connector. Use a voltmeter probe with a sharp tip, that allows you to poke through the insulation into the wire. Measure the voltage you see. Since one is the APS and the other one is the TPS signal and the fact that once you turn on the ignition (do not start the engine) the ECU will be in control of the butterflies, the TPS will be limited in the amount of travel. While the APS will reach about 5V at WOT, the TPS stops short at below 2V (roughly). Reason being that the ECU declines to open the throttle too far, even when the engine is not running.
The one that stops short is your TPS signal. That was the difficult part. Wire the grey wire of the PCIII (same for the Wideband Commander) into that white wire - splice it into the existing wiring and insulated the join well with heat shrink tubing.
Now to digital ground. It should really be called analog ground, but somebody at some point in time mixed the two up and now everybody refers to it as digital ground. What is that?
All the sensors use a separate ground wire to insulate them from other noise signals produced by the engine and its components. In the case of the VMax Yamaha opted to go one step further and introduce two separate sensor ground circuits. One for all the regular air pressure and temperature sensors (rather slowly changing signals) and a separate for just the two APS and TPS sensors. Wire the black/white wire of the PCIII (same for WBC) into that black/brown wire of the VMax circuit.
For power supply to the PCIII and the WBC you should take the red wire of the PCIII (same for WBC) and wire it into one of the many red/blue switched 12V supply lines. There is a whole bunch of them under the right side cover.
Now the setup is different for the rest of the PCIII and WBC installation. The PCIII needs to get looped into the fuel injector signals. There are four of them on the VMax and their color code off the ECU are red/black for injector 1 (#40), green/red for injector 2 (#41), blue/black for injector 3 (#42) and orange/black for injector 4 (#43 on the wirering diagram)
There is a separate 4 pole connector on the right side next to the ECU that caries those for signals. Its best to open up and remove the black outside insulation, cut the wires in the middle and prepare to loop in the PCIII wires. The ones on the ECU side go INTO the PCIII and the ones on the right side need to be connected to the PCIII output. I opted to install plugs so I can remove the PCIII if necessary and connect the stock signal without tools.
The first mapping is the ECU to PCIII side. Connect the VMax red/black wire with the PCIII with the solid orange wire of the PCIII. Next connect the green/red wire from the ECU to the solid yellow wire of the PCIII, next the blue/black form the ECU to the solid green wire of the PCIII and finally the orange/black wire from the ECU to the solid blue wire of the PCIII. The ECU side wires are on the left side when you look down onto the harness from behind.
Now the output signals of the PCIII use an identical color schema, only with the base color being white. So on the exit side connect the VMax red/black wire to the PCIII white/orange wire, the VMax green/red to the PCIII white/yellow, the VMax blue/black to the ECU white/green and finally the Vmax orange/black wire to the white/blue wire of the PCIII. Done.
That was easy, wasn't it? Took about 2h total to figure it our and do the install.
Now clean everything up, remove any tools, make sure everything is nicely insulated (preferably heat shrink tubing) and you should be able to turn on the ignition. The PCIII USB should light up the green LEDs in running light fashion and show you that all of them work. The throttle will be slightly off idle, that's ok. Its the YCCT getting ready to fire up the engine.
If all the lights come up, connect a laptop with a USB cable and check the features of the PCIII. If everything is clear, fire up that engine. Assuming you did everything right the first time, the engine will fire up just like before. The laptop should show about 1200 rpm inside the PCIII software and about 2% throttle during warm up. Once warm, the throttle goes back down to 0% and rpms drop to about 1000 rpm.
That's it. Now you can load up any custom maps you like. I will write a seperate article on how to make custom maps with the on board Wideband Commander. These can be done on a dyno or on the track.
Remeber that this an similar mods are track only modifications to your setup and are for closed course racing only. We do not encourage you to make these changes for street use where prohibited by local or federal law.
Ride safe!
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