Possible to swap ECUs?

[CarbonZHP]

Im looking to have my SAP coded out in my ECU tune, but when I need to put the car back to stock for smog, it would fail. Does anyone know if it is possible to have a second MS45.1 to swap in and run stock? I have all the tools for coding (eg NCS, INPA, PASoft, winKFP).

[Sockethead]

Why not have two tunes you can swap out when needed?

[slater]

Why not have two tunes you can swap out when needed?

you're limited with how many times you can flash the DME... i think it's 12 or 13.


it's a great question, about having two DMEs. i think Terra would know, but he's not really around here anymore.

[nextelbuddy]

as long as you have EWS disabled/coded out of your second DME then its fine.

[rkneeshaw]

You can indeed swap out ECU's back and forth, I've been doing it while I work on my tune. But this requires two things:

1. Full clone of your ECU using BDM that will copy the entire contents of the chip from your original ECU to your new spare. I can confirm that you cannot get enough of the ECU cloned over OBDII, you must use a BDM.
2. Occasionally you may need to use INPA to "resync" EWS if you drive too long on one of the ECU's before swapping.

Another option is having the EWS delete installed, but I think terra is the only one that knows how to delete EWS on the MS45.1 and he's been very busy with school and honestly I haven't heard from him in a while.

[CarbonZHP]

Interesting. What have you been using to tune?

[rkneeshaw]

Well that's a long story actually.

You can use PA Soft to do a read of the calibration section of your DME (0x040000-0x05CFFF, read mode 02) and save it as bin.

Then you can use WinOLS or TunerPro to make your tuning changes to the bin file, but you'll need a map pack for either which tuners guard heavily (because most of them paid heavily to get it).

Or allegedly you can use BimmerEditor by BimTun, costs about $400. But I haven't tried it yet. From what I can tell it supports the basic maps in the MS45.1 such as fueling, ignition, some torque maps too. Includes a hex editor as well, in case you know of an unmapped area of the binary you want to change.

Then the issue is how you get the tune back onto your car after you've modified it. Sadly BimmerEditor doesnt have any read or write ability over OBDII for MS45.1 so you're a bit on your own.

There is possibly a way to convert your modified bin into an .0da file and use WinKFP to flash it back to the car, but I thought there was an issue with the RSA signature when going that route.

Or, if you work with a tuner like Frank Smith, or Markert, or some of the others a lot of them provide a tool from Frieling Racing that can flash a tune back onto the car over OBDII and is super easy. In fact this is the tool ESS uses for their kits but they rebranded the logo with their own logo, its still the frieling racing tool.

Or you could use a BDM to do the reading and writing to your ECU but it's a bench tool, whcih means you pull your ECU from the car and on the bench you can read/flash to it and then reinstall it in the car. I think you can get a chinese clone of the BDM100 for like $50 on ebay.

[CarbonZHP]

Dave Markert promised me that once they hired their new MS45.1 tuner and figured things out they would send me what I needed to remotely update my tune from Markert. Thank you for the long explanation. I need to get back to pestering Dave.

[rkneeshaw]

I think Dave should easily be able to code out your SAP. But there are two ways to do it and I'm not sure what method he would use. There's the cheese method where you just zero out the DTC so the car just doesnt display the error message as a SES light, or there's actually disabling the function that checks for the SAP.

It looks like there is a parameter that disables the SAP check, Lc_inh_safm_man_deac, but I haven't mapped its location in the binary yet and thus haven't tested it. But I'd like to try that instead of just zero'ing out the SAP DTC.

You could mention the frieling racing tool to him, I'm not sure how much it costs for him to license it but it works really well. It flashes the car in about 45 seconds and you can flash the car a billion times if you want. Its super easy to use for the tuner too.

You could also ask Dave if he has a BDM, if you can tolerate being without your DME for a couple days I bet you could ship it to him with the spare and ask him to clone it for you. If he's got a BDM then I think that should be pretty easy for him to do.

[CarbonZHP]

I already did ship him my ecu for the original tune and was without it for 4 weeks