Hello all, found this site while doing some further ECU research because I find myself cheap money wise and not overly zealous to by an AccessPort for my RX-8 to do some further ECU tuning. Now I don't mind spending some time on this tho so I figured maybe I could help expand the supported vehicles for this project. I do know that Mazda ECU's are similar in many ways to Ford ECU's and figure that can be a benefit to working with it.
I have been doing tuning with piggy backs and 3rd party ECU's for a bit as well as a lot of time spent tuning carburated vehicles; from bikes to cars. I currently have a 1983 RX-7 with a 465cfm custom made and tested carburettor on it, a 2004 RX-8 (the one I want to tune eventually) and am in the process of building a Delorean. For work I am a systems engineer and programmer working mostly in Linux and Unix environments and I've been wanting to combine this two passions for a while and this seems like a good place to start.
Now I've not yet worked with an ECU beyond simple monitoring using simple devices and don't plan to jump head long into reflashing the car for now I figure I need to collect raw data. Any tips or pointers as I get going? I plan on purchasing the PDF for the protocol standard to have as a reference but am not sure if there is anything else I should look to get my hands on. Also I don't know if anyone else is working on similar ECU's from Mazda and if so I would be quite happy to team up.
Oh, almost forgot, my name is Michael and I'm from New Hampshire, USA.