Solutions for Vehicles Electronicss Tuning: Operational modes of the engine, brakes, the transmission, and other critical systems of modern automotive vehicles, are stored at the EEPROM of the electronic control unit (ECU). These modes could not be accessed without the usage of specific chip-tuning tools.
Reliable programs and devices for cars chip tuning are available at ECUTools online store (https://ecutools.eu/chip-tuning/).
Types of Chip Tuning Tools
A typical toolkit for chip-tuning consists of the following solutions:
- an adapter;
- an editor;
- a flasher.
Adapters provide the physical interface between the ECU and external PC (smartphone, laptop, tablet). Three interface types are currently used most widely:
- OBD port – this interface is supported by most ECU models and is the least invasive, but some modern ECUs could not be reprogrammed via this port.
- BDM port – this port is located on the motherboard of the ECU, so BDM tuning in some cases requires the removal of the ECU from the car.
- Boot mode – this interface offers unlimited ECU memory access by either attaching probes to specific pins on the ECU or plugging the ECU to the electronic workbench.
Five major OBD protocols are present on the market:
- ISO15765-4 – current USA standard for OBD-II port interface. It uses pins 6 and 14 of the typical OBD-II connector. ISO15765-4 has four sub-interfaces, namely (11 bit, 500 Kbaud, 29 bit, 500 Kbaud, 11 bit, 250 Kbaud, and 29 bit, 250 Kbaud.
- ISO14230-4 – standard protocol for K-Line port, which is typical for Korean and other Asian cars. Uses only pin 7.
- ISO9141-2 – was used by European manufacturers in the middle of 2000th. It uses pins 7 and sometimes 15.
- SAE J1850 VPW – can be found in some General Motors vehicles, and utilizes pin 1.
- SAE J1850 PWM – Ford-specific protocol that uses pins 1 and 2.
Editors are software solutions that provide the ability to display, decode and modify files that were downloaded from the memory of the ECU. Flashers are software-only or software and hardware complex solutions that provide the following functions:
- identifying ECU ID and firmware;
- reading ECU memory contents;
- downloading specific files from ECU EEPROM;
- writing files, modified in the editor, back to the memory of the ECU;
- performing checksum corrections on alternated files.
Popular Programming and Editing Tools
The following flashers were popular among automotive tuning experts:
- Autotuner Tool complex flasher solution, available in Master (unlimited) and Slave (depends on files, prepared it Autotuner Tool Master) editions.
- FLEX complex flasher.
- Alientech Kess v2 and K-Tag complex solutions.
- MMC Flasher program.
- BitBox modular design software.
- PCMflash program-only solution.
Also, most experts recommend such editors as:
- Alientech Titanium universal editor.
- BitEdit modular program.
- StageX.
- S&V Edit.
