We killed my ECU with a bad reflash using ECUflash last night. We've done this many times before with no problem. The only thing that's changed is the cold temperature. Either some voltage was low due to the cold or one of those chips just doesn't like being reflashed when cold, I'm guessing. I'm searching junkyard web sites . . .
If you're going to be playing around with this stuff, and can't afford the downtime if it goes wrong, it is prudent to have a spare ECU on hand. I bought one for mine earlier in the year, in anticipation of the day when ECUFlash will actually support my ECU type. They're not usually that expensive. Especially for the peace of mind it buys. Stuart.
I can afford downtime. My mom has two cars, my roommate has two cars, I have two cars, a motorbike, a pedalbike, and I ride the bus to work usually anyway. P.S. Built-in spellchecker on Firefox 2.0 0wnZ.
i don't think they can be bench flashed.... i think it's cooked unless your good with a soldering iron.. I'd start looking for a new ECU. i always make it a habit now to turn off EVERYTHING when flashing, and to try and flash as quickly as possible. And don't think you AP guys are safe from this either... it can happen to anyone who's flashing if they have a voltage fall off or bad connection, cobb offers no warranty and openly states that it can kill your ecu. it's possibly even more risky on the ap, as it takes so damn long to flash. The only thing that's less risky about the ap is that it has the realtime mapping, and the openecu guys are working on that now.
I don't think I'll be reflashing a cold car again. I found a junkyard in Alabama that has one for $125 + $20 shipping. That seems pretty good, eh?
I'm curious... what did it do? Errors? I have read about people getting the error writing block and ot to turn the car off but try and reflash again...
It had a write error and then said it would try again and then just sat there and didn't do anything. I think I turned the car off after that which was probably a big mistake. I'm not sure what would've happened if we tried to flash it again right away.
If you can get the correct chips I could take a look at soldering it for you. Just an option. I have been doing a lot of surface mount stuff lately.
Thanks for the offer. I'll be looking at options for trying to fix my old one now that I own two. I'm sure if one could figure out how to get those things back to stock programming you'd have a lot of customers.
i put a trickle charger on mine now. had it time out once. not a fun messege. "your cpu might be bad or corrupt, please try again..."
We tried to flash it again with a stock image before turning the key off. Ecuflash said the flash was successful, but the same block was corrupt. After the 2nd flash, I tried a 3rd time -- but this time the ecu wouldn't even initialize. It was at this time that we turned the key off 'cause I was pretty sure that it was borked.
Whatever. As Tom said last night, I'm out $140 for a new ECU and $40 for my share of a Tactrix cable, as opposed to how much for an AccessPort?
FYI, the AP is succeptable to the exact same thing. It isn't the foolproof device that everyone thinks it is. There are plenty of instances where people had their ecus borked by them. But I guess that ignorance is bliss......
ha ha ha.. well O got mine FREEEEEE!! well not really I swapped an engine and gearbox for it... ok so what I mean is if you are a person who doesnt know how to rebuild a gearbox would you DO IT??? well I dont get this openecu stuff.. so I am nervous going that route.. if I knew a bit about it I wouldnt have so much fear... but I am sure after saturday, Tom will show me soem things and we will be good to go... fingers crossed....
Man... I was about to go flash my car, now I'll wait til it's warmed up in the garage. Thanks for the Honesty. I don't really fear cooking and ECU either, I'd rather not, I looked for ecu's before I bought the cable, and figured I could buy a couple used ones before I caught up to an accessport's costs.
yeah, we'll get together and I'll show you some stuff. The openecu tools do the exact same thing as the AP (with the exception of RAM flashing, but that's coming real soon) -- they write blocks of info to the ROM portion of your car's ecu. In fact, I believe that the Cobb maps aren't nearly as safe as everyone thinks they are. There have been more cars than not that I've seen running the Cobb OTS maps that show obvious signs of knocking. Just because you can't hear it, doesn't mean that it isn't happening. For instance, the Cobb maps call for 15* of timing at peak torque under full load -- about 4-5 degrees TOO MUCH for a stg2 2.0L WRX on 91 octane. The reason why this happens is because Cobb never rescaled their load columns to accomidate for the extra output of the engine. So what happens is that the car will essentially "run out of bounds of the map." What the ecu will do is use the last cell within the range of the map and use those values -- which happen to be far too agressive for the loads the car will see under full boost. If it wasn't for the ecu's knock correction system, our cars would detonate themselves to death, lol.
It was a totally different mapping altogether. However, both maps were based on the same ROM code. I was actually thinking to myself that something was up while the car was flashing -- normally it only takes like 30 seconds, max. After over a minute, I began to get a little nervous.
