When I discovered the fried stock ECU, I ordered a “stock” ECU from eBay. The seller claims it has not been messed with, so I hoped to get it installed and flash the Stage 2 tune from COBB. I successfully unmarried the COBB tuner from the old ECU (required to put the tune on a new ECU), then tried to hook it up to the new ECU. It wouldn't sync up to the new eBay ECU, but because the COBB V1 is like 15 years old, I figured it had served its time. I contacted COBB just in case they had a recommendation to get it working, but they told me the V1 has been unsupported for quite a long time, but they'd give me $100 towards a V3 tuner.
I don't want to spend $650 on that right now, so I decided down another path: OpenSource!
There exists a non-zero amount of people that use some software called ECUFlash and Romraider with an OBDII adapter called a Tactrix OpenPort to download the ECU image, edit it, then re-upload it. This is tuning.
My friend Kevin did a bit of it on an STi he had in The Great White North, and while that car is gone now, he has a Tactrix OpenPort which he offered to loan me.
It looks like this:
I diligently followed the instructions online, but I kept getting some sort of read error whenever I tried to download the current image. Ye olde google eventually led me to numerous posts pretty much telling me that this eBay ECU has been messed with in the past and is now locked and untunable by anything other than whatever is on there. There's a company called ECUtek that is infamous for locking these ECU's with their tune (in the name of protecting their IP), and it pretty much ruins the ECU for anything else.
The eBay person I purchased it from tells me he had no idea and it worked fine for him when he needed a stock ECU and "hope this helps!".
It does not, in fact, help. It does, however, explain why the COBB V1 I have was acting broken. So maybe that thing's okay after all.
I've ordered ANOTHER eBay "stock" ECU, although this particular seller tells me it's OEM and "virgin". So hopefully I'll have better luck?
I was frustrated and wandering about the shop aimlessly after this series of discoveries, cursing my luck and just wanting to take my ball and go home. But instead I thought maybe I'd work on getting the wideband gauge installed.
So here's that.
I used to be really into tucking everything away to look good, but now that I've worked on so much stuff, I prioritize intelligent placement that’s easy to service. Fewer hidden things.
Like the connector for the wideband sensor is tied up nice and easy to see and service, if need be.
There are two connectors to the back of the gauge. One is the connector to the sensor, then the other is power, ground, and a bunch of signally stuff. There are outputs for 5V analog, CAN, and Serial. I'm not implementing any of that right now, but I will in the future, so I labeled everything for identification later.
I need to mess around with the settings on the labeller a bit more, because I currently waste >50% of the printing material.
The only wires I'm using for now are the power and ground. The lug/terminals I installed for the other 3 gauges are paying off already; it was so easy to just pop on a couple ring terminals to install this. Yay.
Victory:
Now I just need to figure out where to put it.
As I mentioned before, I pretty much totaled the EGT gauge by cutting and splicing the thermocouple sensor wires. Thermocouples generate a tiny voltage (like microvolts) from two dissimilar metals forming an electrical junction. Splicing in other different metals totally jacks that all up, creating more unknown junctions.
It's not too big of a loss as the gauge was totally dead before I did all that anyway. I'd call the manufacturer or look at the documentation for the gauge to repair it and put in the right connections, but the company is out of business and there is no documentation. I think I'll probably put the wideband in that spot for now, then use EGT with new sensors and all that when I do a datalogger.
Thanks for reading!
damen
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