If anyone can give me guidance on this it would be a ton of help...

A friend of mine had a stage 2 kit installed and tuned by Vishnu. He is in the middle of a breakup with his long time girlfriend and the car is in her name :huh: . Now he has to change the registration over to his name and in california that means smog check. We have a place here where we can test the numbers to see how close they are and we will do so next week. My question is, what should I look to change on the XEDE to get the car to run cleaner? I know I can play with the timing (retard for smog?) as well as MAF (higher AF ratio), but will this even affect it while its sitting there running in closed loop?

Any other recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Also, he has gone from 3 cats to 1 cat.

Any station that will do smog tests should also test your car without the intention of reporting the results for testing purposes. In fact, many offer to do so that in case your car is reported as a gross polluter, it doesn't get sent back to the DMV which will cause you to have to go to a smog-test-only station which in general are MUCH more strict than your typical smog test / repair station.

Your biggest problem will be the fact that you only have 1 cat when there should be 3. Hopefully the mechanic will look past it as 1 cat should be clean enough to pass the sniffer, otherwise you're looking at pulling the aftermarket exhaust and XEDE and essentially returning to stock.

They will rev your car up to 2500rpm in neutral and hold it there for the test so I'm not sure tweaking your idle settings will work. Tell him not to break up with his girlfriend!! On a serious note, maybe I could help you out. I just had to smog my STi for change of ownership and it was the biggest bitch ever. I couldn't pass with basic bolt ons(header, uppipe, high flow dual cat tbe) in cali...ended up having to put in the stock downpipe to pass. I highly doubt you could pass with only 1 cat with how strict cali is. Since the green is a bolt on turbo I guess you could bolt it up to the stock downpipe and stock midpipe and pass...that would be your friend's best bet. Otherwise...I know a few places that will pass you $200-$400 and one friend of mine claims he'll get you passed for $150...but he talks a lot and lags. If your friend is in the OC/LA area tell him to send me a message if he's interested...

I don't live in Cali- I don't know what I'm talking about.
With the maps provided by Vishnu, the Xede doesn't modify signals when the calculated load is fairly low; >45%ish. If the dyno doesn't provide a significant load, then no manipulation is in effect. But yeah what about the visual inspection?