63 Testing Help for Programmer and Logger
Thread Starter
Senior Member
Joined: Feb 2009
Posts: 329
Likes: 21
12C P85DL
Have you been couped up at Spearment Rhino? 
Seriously though, I am reading this stuff and only understanding 45% of what the hell is going on. Reading lolachamps write ups is sort of like opening a textbook in quantum physics and just reading cold turkey...
I need to read and re-read some sections and break them apart.
Very interesting research, you are truly passionate lolachamp. If we had you and Superlubricity in an underground lab crazy things would be happening. Keep up the hard work, I look forward to seeing your results...
Seriously though, I am reading this stuff and only understanding 45% of what the hell is going on. Reading lolachamps write ups is sort of like opening a textbook in quantum physics and just reading cold turkey...
I need to read and re-read some sections and break them apart.
Very interesting research, you are truly passionate lolachamp. If we had you and Superlubricity in an underground lab crazy things would be happening. Keep up the hard work, I look forward to seeing your results...
Thread Starter
Senior Member
Joined: Feb 2009
Posts: 329
Likes: 21
12C P85DL
I got a question about buying more cost effective BDM tools and doing the ECU work at home. I thought it might be useful if I posted the response here as well.
I have considered non-EVC BDM100s in the past and have not bought nor recommended one myself. My reasoning is that I am dealing with an ECU that will cost upwards of $1500 to replace (depending upon model and dealer that does the car - most of the them I do not have access to the car) and I do not want to chance using anything other than what I know works. I did have a friend that bought a BDM100 off EBay and it simply was not recognized by OLS nor did it seem to work with the software provided. I have also recovered bricked ECUs programmed by faulty BDMs from other manufacturers like XYZ. These failures were do mostly to incorrect reads that later caused problems with checksums.
With respect to re-tuning when the dealer installs new firmware, that would entail migrating the tuning changes from the old firmware to the new. This is the basic function of any tuner once they have their set of map edits defined. It is a non-trivial exercise requiring a bit of experience with WinOLS or a similar package and access to the raw tuned binary. Most tuners will not provide the raw tuned binary and tunes are normally protected with a no read marker to prevent normal BDMs from reading the file back out. In short, getting the hardware only gets you part of the way to where you want to be.
I have considered non-EVC BDM100s in the past and have not bought nor recommended one myself. My reasoning is that I am dealing with an ECU that will cost upwards of $1500 to replace (depending upon model and dealer that does the car - most of the them I do not have access to the car) and I do not want to chance using anything other than what I know works. I did have a friend that bought a BDM100 off EBay and it simply was not recognized by OLS nor did it seem to work with the software provided. I have also recovered bricked ECUs programmed by faulty BDMs from other manufacturers like XYZ. These failures were do mostly to incorrect reads that later caused problems with checksums.
With respect to re-tuning when the dealer installs new firmware, that would entail migrating the tuning changes from the old firmware to the new. This is the basic function of any tuner once they have their set of map edits defined. It is a non-trivial exercise requiring a bit of experience with WinOLS or a similar package and access to the raw tuned binary. Most tuners will not provide the raw tuned binary and tunes are normally protected with a no read marker to prevent normal BDMs from reading the file back out. In short, getting the hardware only gets you part of the way to where you want to be.
