Support for 350Z ECU
Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 5:46 amHey guys,
well, the time has come and I sold my 04 WRX. She was very good to me and I had great success with tuning her. I got myself into a 350Z and started to look into tuning options for 350Z. Well, sadly to say, the offerings are very limited. There is really no good alternative other than paying large amounts of money for a reflash which I have no way of really verifying. The options I found so far out there are:
1. Technosquare/AAM reflash - looks like a basic stock ECU reflash. You tell them your mods, mail them your ECU and they flash it for you. From what I can tell, people just blindly assume it's good and it's doing what is advertised. I've seen dyno plots and the gains are small at best. - $600 and up
2. Cipher - a tuning tool, basic logging, allows up to 2 degrees of advancement, yikes. Seems very limited in what it can actually change in the stock ECU programming. - $400
3. UTEC - full featured tuning solution, works well, expensive - $950
4. eManage - another full featured tuning solution, generic support for lots of cars, understandibly it seems like people have issues with some of the features of it not working correctly with Nissan ECU - $500
Seems like the Z tuning community is not nearly as mature as the Subaru one. There aren't many options availble and they are very limited as to what can be done with the cars. There's plenty of people wanting to tune but it's so undeveloped and lacking solid knowledge of tuning that most either give up or open up wallets and pay insane amounts to tuners. A project like openECU would blow away most offereings out there. I am curious to see how many people here would like the Z support. I can tell you that the demand is out there. The community is ripe for a shake up. I personally would LOVE to get involved with stock ECU tuning again. A platform like VQ35 engine has potential. It's factory tuned for 91oct. There's plenty of NA upgrades in forms of exhaust, plenum extenders, intakes, cams, etc.
So, I guess the first thing is to figure out which chipset is used on the VQ35 engines. From what I can gather, the older version of Nissans, VQ30 engines used a Hitachi processor, H8/536. Chances are the newer models also use a Hitachi chip, most likely newer. If I were to yank the ECU out, what kind of chances do I have of being able to see anything meaningful on it that would provide more info?
Thoughts?
well, the time has come and I sold my 04 WRX. She was very good to me and I had great success with tuning her. I got myself into a 350Z and started to look into tuning options for 350Z. Well, sadly to say, the offerings are very limited. There is really no good alternative other than paying large amounts of money for a reflash which I have no way of really verifying. The options I found so far out there are:
1. Technosquare/AAM reflash - looks like a basic stock ECU reflash. You tell them your mods, mail them your ECU and they flash it for you. From what I can tell, people just blindly assume it's good and it's doing what is advertised. I've seen dyno plots and the gains are small at best. - $600 and up
2. Cipher - a tuning tool, basic logging, allows up to 2 degrees of advancement, yikes. Seems very limited in what it can actually change in the stock ECU programming. - $400
3. UTEC - full featured tuning solution, works well, expensive - $950
4. eManage - another full featured tuning solution, generic support for lots of cars, understandibly it seems like people have issues with some of the features of it not working correctly with Nissan ECU - $500
Seems like the Z tuning community is not nearly as mature as the Subaru one. There aren't many options availble and they are very limited as to what can be done with the cars. There's plenty of people wanting to tune but it's so undeveloped and lacking solid knowledge of tuning that most either give up or open up wallets and pay insane amounts to tuners. A project like openECU would blow away most offereings out there. I am curious to see how many people here would like the Z support. I can tell you that the demand is out there. The community is ripe for a shake up. I personally would LOVE to get involved with stock ECU tuning again. A platform like VQ35 engine has potential. It's factory tuned for 91oct. There's plenty of NA upgrades in forms of exhaust, plenum extenders, intakes, cams, etc.
So, I guess the first thing is to figure out which chipset is used on the VQ35 engines. From what I can gather, the older version of Nissans, VQ30 engines used a Hitachi processor, H8/536. Chances are the newer models also use a Hitachi chip, most likely newer. If I were to yank the ECU out, what kind of chances do I have of being able to see anything meaningful on it that would provide more info?
Thoughts?
