rollex

Yeah that is a crazy thing to do. Reduce the sensitivity if you've datalogged the sh*t out of it with a high end knock detection setup in a large number of conditions sure, but remove it entirely? What if your fuel pump starts to fail, goodbye engine.

Why would someone zero the injector voltage offsets? It just sounds like a bandaid to having incorrect slopes?

What specifically are the sort of mistakes that were made? Not looking to point fingers just use it as an opportunity to learn some more things to avoid.

Lets be honest, tuning is difficult. Getting a car running is easy, but properly tuning a vehicle is difficult and requires lots of experience. Most mechanics don't have this experience, nor do they have a good mentor hence the result is you get a car that runs "alright", but is sub par compared to the original factory tune. Unless people are tuners themselves they won't even know that their tune is sub par, because of this the tuners get minimal bad feedback which self reinforces their bad tuning skills. Even if you are smart and have a formal education in these areas without the hands experience (which without a dyno is very difficult to get) and a good teacher your first tunes will be subpar. All a learning experience though, unfortunately a lot of people learn on customers cars. Not many people do what Jet for example did and buy a test car/dyno to teach themselves.

Ah so mainly web development stuff. That is one area I've managed to avoid so far!

What kind? I'm open to other people helping out if they have experience writing comms libraries or .NET WPF UIs.

You work in IT? Software Engineer?

I added DMR logging in about 5 hours yesterday. No idea how it took HPTuners so long...

Yep. I've been using an openport J2534 cable which is around $200 with the exchange rate. It will also work with VCM2 and other cables that most tuners already own.

I've just released my Alpha version of my read/write software. You can read/write BA, BF and FG with autodetection now. No VIN lock and unlimited writes with everything currently free. PM me on pcmhacking if you'd like to trial the alpha version. https://pcmhacking.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4940&p=72163#p72163

Yeah and if you need to claim warranty can send it back to them which is easier than mailing to the states.

It is due to them supporting an absolutely gigantic number of vehicles. Pros and cons and that is definitely a big pro for HPTuners! Quite a few people have suggested tunerpro however due to the level of GUI customisation I want going a fully custom program is the best route for me. I'm also a bit of a perfectionist with programming and like having control of the entire application to make it look and behave exactly as I want. I could release something in a few weeks that will use the proof of concept GUI that will do the first two items on the roadmap. The reason I won't is I don't want people to use an unfinished program that uses the ugly winforms GUI. Needs to feel polished from day one. Anyway I'll try and keep all my updates in the PCM hacking thread. I'll post back here again when I need some more beta testers or have a public release.

Road map is as follows: Merge my J2534 proof of concept flash program into my editor program. Rewrite my proof of concept editor in WPF with a modern pretty GUI, I'm looking at Motec M1 and stuff as inspiration however I want more wizards to try and make it as easy to use as possible. I don't want people to have to go looking for information, I want it to explain things well enough for it to be obvious how to setup injector slopes, speed density maps etc without having to go read 50 different forum threads and get 10 different answers. If I can't explain what a map/parameter does then I won't display it in the wizard. Open source definitions with descriptions/naming/help files that doesn't infringe on existing products. Implement basic DMR logging (no graphs) Map tracing Implement proper logging with graphs Investigate live tuning via custom ROM that stores maps in RAM I'm unsure how I will divide free/paid versions up however initially I want a read/write flasher with basic definitions that are free for the backyard tuner. The other goal I want is for it to have excellent support for a limited number of vehicles, eg BA/BF/FG. Nothing else will be considered until this is complete as I don't like the "good enough" approach, I want a polished I's dotted and Ts crossed product.

If you buy from the Australian website direct you will get it delivered quicker http://vcmstore.com.au/ On another note my flash tuning tool is progressing. I can read and write the flash of a BF/FG, view and edit the binary, change VIN etc. I have a BA PCM someone donated on it's way so I will be supporting this as well shortly. I can also flash the ford generic .PHF files that you can download from their website to flash your car back to stock. The files PHF files are not a 100% complete flash however if you have a matching strategy I can merge it with the downloaded flash to put the car back to stock. Have a read of my thread on PCM hacking if you are interested. I've got a small number of people alpha testing it at the moment. Looking to to release a public beta around Christmas time with some basic definitions being released for free. My goal is to eventually implement proper map tracing to make tuning much easier than HPT/SCT, I also have an open source XML definition format so people can create their own definitions that can be used for free. I'm doing it all via a Tactrix OpenPort 2.0 J2534 cable, only costs $169 USD so quite a cheap option. https://pcmhacking.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4940&sid=c5a4f18970142ae6145374aa5336aa69&p=71386#p71386

I haven't mapped injectors for many other ECUs from scratch. Why don't you need it and what is the process you follow?

Do KPM publish good data of their injectors? Eg the flow slopes like the ID spreadsheet?

Contact Grant at custom tuning in Vic, pretty sure he can do this for you if you mail your ECU to him. It is a bit of a *beep* to get it out, you can unscrew the tamper proof screws with vice grips if you spend 45 mins on it. I hacksawed some slits into them so they can be easily removed afterwards as well. http://www.customtuning.com.au/ custom-tuning@hotmail.com Something else to consider, how different is a BF ecu? Could you flash a BA program into it? I'm pretty sure you can do the reverse. The PCMs might have different codes but I'm pretty sure physically they are the same, they just have different programs (strategys) on them which can surely be flashed between the differnet models without issue. HPTuners for example will let you flash a different strategy into your PCM, you can also fairly easily hack the binary to change the VIN afterwards.

Anything is doable, it is just a matter of how long it takes and much it costs. For example the nistunes guys did it on nissan ECUs by installing a daughter board in the PCM that allows it write the flash whilst the ECU is running meaning you can read/write the maps whilst the car is running. It requires a physical daughter board due to the lack of memory in the oldschool processor, if they had a new PCM they could probably do what I'm thinking of doing. Should be a bit of fun, need to find a good programmer/debugger for the power pc. I wonder if the PCM has the programming headers on the PCB still.

I guess the next question is whether people would buy yet another cable for this. Would probably initially use a mongoose cable as it supports J2534 passthrough and raising the programming pin voltages. These are almost $500 USD atm though. Anyone have a spare BF/FG PCM they are looking at getting rid of? I might buy one off ebay and see if my custom firmware idea will break other parts of the car. Same goes for a mongoose cable, anyone have a ford one they don't use? (or any J2534 pass thru cable for that matter) If my idea fails then the next best thing is map tracing which is absolute 100% achievable with no PCM firmware mods. I have no idea why HPT have not implemented this yet as it is so easy to do. Does SCT have map tracing?

How many of you guys have tuned ECUs that have live tuning, eg you can modify tables whilst the car is running and see how it changes? Do you guys like it? I have some ideas on how I could implement this for the ford PCMs, it however would require a multiple months of development so I'm not sure if the effort would be worth it. The method I have in mind wouldn't require modifying the PCM and could be done via software only (yet to be proven but I believe it is absolutely possible). Most likely it would go down the path of SCT where you can only use certain "base" tunes per car, it wouldn't be something you could easily add to existing tunes or strategy's. Is this kind of feature desirable? Would people pay for it?

Have you ever used sniper? Curious if it has even more parameters

Don seemed to think he could get an aussie dongle that would work with the Advantage 3 software whilst being in the US. I'm not sure how he would do this but he seemed confident it could be done. End of the day the PCM code is the same whether you use HP tuners or SCT so any "weird things" would have to be due to changing variables by mistake. It is possible they had mapped variables incorrectly meaning you wrote to them by mistake but people would have reported and had these fixed by now.

Don lasota said he would buy the software on my behalf and then mail the dongle to me. Not cheap (as he puts his markup and then a pain in the ass factor cost) also you don't get any support as you effectively bought it through someone else. I don't want it as hpt can do everything I want but it is an option if someone desperately wants SCT

Check on the tune repository. Here is a collection of random tunes I've downloaded. Most of them aren't stock so be wary with what you read. https://www.dropbox.com/s/po9mt795m6amxjo/Tunes.zip?dl=0

I think you'll find that is $153 USD. The gauge is useful though as its its good to drive around with it on a stock vehicle for a few weeks to get a feel for how the stock engine responds, if you don't know how the stock engine responds you'll just be guessing once you start modifying it.