openecu.org

Hi,

my name is Luke, this is my first post. I am from Australia and I drive a Ford Falcon XR6 Turbo. Tuning options for this car are expensive. $800AU for some poxy "flash tuner" which can only load generic tunes onto your car, or pay a tuner a further ~$1000AU to do a custom tune using this box. My brother has an EVO7 and tunes it using a Tactrix cable and EvoScan. I have done a bit of a search on your forum here but havent really found the info I am after. I would like to know if I was to read the data off my ECU using my brothers tactrix cable (assuming that can be done), is there some way that someone here could help me to make it tunable. I am a relatively bright guy, I have done some work with PIC micro controllers, and know a fair bit about electronics, but have never worked with car ecu's. If someone tells me if this is completely impossible then that is fine, or if it is possible, point me in the right direction, I'm willing to spend the time on this.

It is only my opinion but,

If you haven't tuned a car before, haven't worked with this Micro before, haven't tuned an engine with dual variable cams, fly-by-wire throttle and if auto, torque reduction and gearshift control, you might be biting off a fairly large chunk of work, but hey, you never know how big a project is until you get right into it
I think it's a lot of work but it depends if you have enough time to spend. For me, I'd allow 300hours to get a start point and a good understanding of the operation of the software before tuning on a real engine if you're going from scratch with no other assistance.

Good luck
Lachlan

Maybe I should make myself more clear, I have tuned cars before, and have a good understanding of tuning systems, my brother has qualifications in tuning also, so as far as tuning the car once I gain access, I have no problems. What lets me down is the electronics knowledge, as I said, I have worked with PIC's but nothing to this level.

There are tuning options available for this car, but they are very expensive. I'm looking at getting one of these expensive units unfortunately, however I'd like to find a way to get the tactrix system to work as even the most expensive unit for this car are not owner tunable. From what I understand the biggest problem is understanding how to turn the raw data from the ecu into a format I can understand and modify. If I were to get my tuner to create a map for me where say the whole ignition map is set to 1 degree, and the fuel map set to say 2% and the like with other settings, would this make it easier to sort this out.

I understand that I'm coming across mega noob, but some simple answers or just a bump in the right direction would be fantastic, thankyou, Luke.