After my first post, I looked around at other poster's remarks & decided that I should fiddle around with the initiating sequence to see if I could come up with a way for my laptop to talk to this goddamn ecu
"Going by the book" as per Scoobypedia gave me no joy at all. The following process ended up working 2/10 times for me and I post it here for 2 reasons. 1. Just in case someone else is also having similar issues and 2. To provide the Openecu experts with hopefully useful information related to Australian ecu's on bugeye WRX's.
Here are my steps:
1. Connect the green connectors together.
2. Install the flash connector (white connector)
3. Connect the OBD2 cobbection to the under dash plug
4. Fire up ecuFlash
5. Plug in the USB port - at this point the bottom left hand of the screen would show "OpenPort 1.3 Subaru....." but after 1 sec would disappear & show nothing. This is where I believe my problem is.
6. Go to the Read ecu icon & select the car BUT DO NOT PRESS READ YET
7. Ignition to ON but not Start.
8. Pull out USB cable & re-insert. A second or so after you re-insert, you will see "OpenPort 1.3 Subaru....." come up on the bottom right hand corner again. When it does, quickly press READ on the car selection dialogue box. This action seems to lock the connection and will bring up the dialogue box that says press OK to download the maps. I just press OK as the IGN is already on.
In the meantime, maybe someone out there can see the obvious issue & advise.
Thx all.