NA-T 03 is300

I could write a treatise on this topic, but I'll try to keep it short and sweet:

1. Internal combustion is going away and "they" will continue to make it more and more difficult to own or operate equipment that uses ICE...so pursuing tuning as a potential career trajectory may not be the best idea.

2. If your time is worth anything at all, you'll be (a lot of) money ahead just paying a qualified tuner to tune your projects. Can you learn it? Absolutely. But by the time you're solidly competent, you'll be hundreds - and probably thousands of hours into it. It doesn't make sense to spend 500 hours learning something you could pay somebody $500 to do.

3. If tuning just gets you wet - then do it. There's no better way to do it then simply get your hands dirty. Get an inexpensive platform with known potential and get to it.

4. There are many excellent resources out there to help you learn. HP Academy is very solid, though they usually only provide the 20,000 foot view; and they tend to be a bit "elitist". For the nitty gritty of how to work with specific ECU platforms, Evans Performance Academy is fantastic. Youtube is a great resource also - but the problem is any schmuck can self-anoint as an "expert" and pontificate BS down on you. You need to know what is solid, what's an opinion, and what's bunk on the front-end....which is knowledge a newbie won't often have.

5. Understand that Toyota ECUs are not readily re-flashed or chip-tuned. Subies and Mitsushitti ECUs are easily reflashed via RomRaider and other tools, but for Toyotas, you're really talking about aftermarket programmable ECUs.

I started down this path recently, with a firm background in electronics hardware and software: I'm going the "open source" route with rusEFI. You could say I want to get wet, what's important is being able to maintain and understand the setup in case something goes awry and be able to freely fix and improve it and not beholden to others' schedules or whims or even finances.

I will say, what that guy says in his video near the start is very accurate: understanding how the engine works is probably the most important thing if you're serious about tuning (versus the end result). With this understanding, the rest of the specifics about a particular platform will follow: all of that information is readily available, it's just a matter of understanding what knobs/switches that platform has to effect the control you're after. With rusEFI, I can answer questions by inspecting the actual logic that the knobs/switches control, which is extremely insightful, as is the small community (both devs and users) and the knowledge bases that have been developed (wiki, forums, GitHub issues).

I intend to approach my goals in steps:

• running a known good motor on a stand with the stock ECU (might skip this depending how much I have to trick the ECU).
• run the same NA setup with rusEFI: developing the infrastructure and getting a firm understanding of the available controls about the basics (fueling, spark/timing, closed-loop, VVT, etc.) and chasing out all of the gremlins
• adapting the setup to NA-T and understanding those controls and trade-offs, probably with some cheapo turbo
• swapping to the turbo of choice, dialing, and installing in the finished vehicle

I find it really difficult to meet and get in with [Toyota] knowledgeable members of the local community, but this is something I need to work on: go to events and network, talk with folks, get information and contacts. I'm not even sure if there's a shop I could throw money at to do things the way I'd like, keeping me informed and knowledgeable about my setup.