🔥 Get a T-Shirt or Mug by leaving an Apple Podcast review, or even a question! www.hpa-tunedin.com/ If we read out your review at the end of a future episode, get in touch to grab your freebie. Easy 🧠- Taz 🧔🏻 🔵 Building a fast car? Get $400 OFF the all-inclusive VIP online course package deal: hpcdmy.co/offery152 🦵Kickstart your EFI Tuning knowledge. Get 50% OFF your first online course: hpcdmy.co/offery152
I'm Industrial engineer, working for a well known european automotive company and I've got background as a "chiptuner". I gotta say guys, CONGRATULATIONS for this podcast (I'm just half way through). It's the frist time I see an interview about this field that's not actually useless nor totally disconnected from the reality, nor intentionally hiding stuff nor the interviewed doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Every basic has been covered and explained and you can smell the experience by the screen. Keep it like that y saludos desde España! (Ps: talking about the Funktionsrahmen would've been 10/10)
James you're a breath of fresh air in the tuning world. I'm exclusively in diesel pickup tuning and the master/slave relationship has been and still is an arduous battle to get over. I've recently broke out with a little searching and money and looking at files. I commend you on your approach to tuning. When you're totally up front with the customer you will thrive. Good job sir
If manufacturers don't want us to reverse engineer their ECUs then they will have to make their own CPUs lol. Compiled codes laid in the ROM are compiled with tools that's made for each CPU. Even if the CPU is new, it will be decompilable soon. Or if it's the CPUs that's been around, then it's most likely to get decompiled when someone wants to. No one can fight that once we get our hands on the ROMs. WinOLS might not be the tool for reverse engineering, but it's very useful and very well worth it for rom editing. The more you use it, the more useful it is. There are many professional WinOLS users who don't rely on other tuning software anymore, they just use WinOLS. WinOLS is the best automotive hex editor, not just my opinion, just facts. If you go further with Ghidra or IDA Pro, and you keep digging without stopping, you will find yourself somewhere deep in the rabbit hole without yourself realizing before that exact moment. I urge you all to keep digging and digging. And then one day, stock ECU tuning can really be truly community driven. I've been playing with Honda ROMs for a couple of months. I haven't had any experience in tuning and reverse engineering before. Now I can lock the reading through OBD2 port, I can define read keys in Honda ROMs, I can find all the maps in Honda ROMs (that's not Bosch). And I mean I do that accurately. All thanks to the people that I got myself into. That helps accelerate my learning a lot. And I know that it won't take long for you too! We can even do a turbo tune on stock Honda ECUs without any special tools. Changing map sensor is possible in so many Honda ECUs. MAF scaling is very easy. And tools for reading and writing are widely avilable these days. Datalogging technology is super great these days. Once you are reverse engineering. You will know what to touch when tuning and what you woudn't want to if you don't know what you are doing. You can even relocate the tuning tables and extend the tables for more tuning refinement, or do a turbo tune in extended tables and axises. You can separate parameters that's being used by different functions to make them independent when you are making custom stuffs. There are many things to see and to learn. And you can really see how manufacturers do things. You will see how every thing is connected together. What this table does, how a function looks up the value it needs to, what sets the data type, where its selected value goes, which ram address it sets, what reads that set ram address, what it uses it for, and so on! DO NOT STOP DIGGING! IT WILL ALWAYS GET BETTER EVERY DAY!
Have you got your head in the sand, we have been community tuning the 4g63 and 4bt11 platforms forever. Hex editors Ecuflash Evoscan We have finally hit a milestone recently in finally cracking the TCU for the Getrag DCT. Sure Syvecs could manage the DCT befor the community, but as a cummunity we finally acheived it
@@nathanpallavicini6687 Well, I'm happy for Subaru and Mitsubishi tuners that you all got it together since long time ago. Can't say the same for Honda OBD2 (not OBD1).
Four stroke motocross motorcycles is what we race and the story is the ECU’S are locked and can’t be turned beyond a certain low level that the manufacturer allows/ supplies for the bikes after listening sounds like I need to contact James for the information to make that happen. Thanks for all your time and help with the black hole of ECU’S
Good video. One correction with an A2L VS HEX file. The a2l is actually the “frame” and the hex is the “data”, so the other way around from mentioned in this video. Source : I work as an calibration engineer at Bosch
I was hired to reflash all of the Astras that came over as Saturn's back in the day. Part of the reason for the reflash specifically was an issue with wipers and electronic noise at certain speeds LOL. This was all done right after the cars left the ships when they were at the vpc's (vehicle preparation centers) I think we did somewhere around 1500.
This was a great podcast. It really touched home with me. I have a car equipped with a Megasquirt 1 that i learned on. I have another car that i wanted to MS, but i wanted it to be as reliable as a Toyota. I decided to keep the OBD1 ECU and program it with a chip, dyno tuned by a tuner that has great experience with this model car and tuning strategy. That worked until i found a driving condition that exposed a tuning hole. I also was a little disappointed in the max power output for how i built the car. I suggested MS to my tuner and he is against using standalones for a few reasons, mainly because they take so long to complete. He lives far away and seems uninterested in working with such old tech. I want to take my project tuning into my own hands and get the power i believe that's in it and make it have Toyota manners. Great podcast HPA, Andre and Mr. O'Conner - Pantyeatr1 🏆
Thank you for another great episode. Plenty of acronyms that I never heard before, but at least now I know what I don't know. I hope that the new HPA course will clarify all that.
Great podcast. I used OLS few times (mainly to get initial manufacturer values for some settings), and yes, if you're not aware what you are looking for and where to find it, you could easily get lost into a sea of meaningless hex numbers... Both the strength and weakness of OLS is that it present you all the raw code from a ROM, and permit you to change everything you want... After that it's tuner's responsibility to modify right datas, in meaningful way.
Thank you for the very informative information! Can anyone recommend a tuning software that will work for a 2007 Mini Cooper S Turbo? HPTuners does not support Mini or BMW.
Very cool you've looked into WinOLS now. I remember asking you about 5 years ago for help and you hadn't worked with it much or at all then. I've since stepped away from VAG products and now own a Dodge, so much simpler tuning. Loved the pod and keep up the exceptional work!
Yes it has taken us a while and we hope the demand is there to help those who need the knowledge out. You might own a VW etc in the future again, who knows, although there is more commercial software available for them now than there was 5 years ago too. Not all good though, HP Tuners for examples works on some Mks but not on others despite advertising stating otherwise! What platform are you using with your Dodge, that is on our list as well probably, via HP Tuners - Taz.
Excellent philosophy expressed here and I don't think it's gonna reduce revenue because often the more people learn the better they appreciate and understand what you're providing and the more they are willing to pay I certainly am ..
Another very interesting pod cast again. Many thanks HPA. James sounds like the guy to tune my 500E Mercedes Bosch LH Jetronic. Just finished building a 6 litre monster with loads of goodies. Was think of going with an after market ECU, but would much sooner go with a modified data on the ECU
I heard that some companies are gonna try and use internet connectivity to refresh the ecu if it detects a change in the rom. I'm interested to see how they plan to do that and how people will overcome that.
These kinds of checks are fairly easy to bypass. Similar things are done in desktop software DRM. You just find the section of code where it stores the home server information and falsify or disable it. Redirect it to a different server that returns a blanket all good signal, etc
To add up on why it's better to teach and share the knowledge, is it's because whatever "secret" you think you came up, it's been discovered already. Especially at this day and age, the improvement are very little that it's as if there is no big difference.
First time caller long time listener, thankyou for these podcasts. Does a tuner without a dyno just chuck 8 bags of spuds in the boot a drive around with the hand brake on?
Cheers for calling on in! Easier to left foot brake, and only 8kg of spuds if you happen to by buying that many at once to stock up the pantry 😅 - Taz. www.hpacademy.com/previous-webinars/the-key-to-road-tuning-left-foot-braking/? www.hpacademy.com/blog/was-our-dyno-tuning-accurate-our-fd-rx7-project-ep-3-build/?
You need an interface tool which extracts and writes the data from and to the ECU and these will generally make the required checksum corrections for you too, although you can use 3rd party services for this too if required for any reason. If you were using something like HP Tuners, their MVPI device does all these things for you. For WinOLS we can use things like PCMFlash with a Tactrix cable or the likes of Autotuner and bFlash if we're commercial users (they come at a commercial user price). Since this podcast was recorded we now offer this course FYI. It might be something you find useful: www.hpacademy.com/courses/winols-mastery-map-identification-and-editing/? - Taz
The guy who was charging me 1000 usda a car never shared shit with me and ripped me off when he sold me software what a toxic type of person especially after we did business together for 3 years!
Just as it gets tougher and tougher to root our phones, (maybe no longer possible?) Something similar will likely happen with the car computers. Now we'll have KNOX running on our cars.
![101: What’s the Best Engine Platform to Learn Tuning On? [#PODCAST]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ch8MDJgVQNk/mqdefault.jpg)
🔥 Get a T-Shirt or Mug by leaving an Apple Podcast review, or even a question! www.hpa-tunedin.com/
If we read out your review at the end of a future episode, get in touch to grab your freebie. Easy 🧠- Taz 🧔🏻
🔵 Building a fast car? Get $400 OFF the all-inclusive VIP online course package deal: hpcdmy.co/offery152
🦵Kickstart your EFI Tuning knowledge. Get 50% OFF your first online course: hpcdmy.co/offery152
I'm Industrial engineer, working for a well known european automotive company and I've got background as a "chiptuner". I gotta say guys, CONGRATULATIONS for this podcast (I'm just half way through). It's the frist time I see an interview about this field that's not actually useless nor totally disconnected from the reality, nor intentionally hiding stuff nor the interviewed doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Every basic has been covered and explained and you can smell the experience by the screen. Keep it like that y saludos desde España! (Ps: talking about the Funktionsrahmen would've been 10/10)
So I looked up funktionsrahmen and in English that means function sheet. Is that Just a winOLS manual?
James you're a breath of fresh air in the tuning world. I'm exclusively in diesel pickup tuning and the master/slave relationship has been and still is an arduous battle to get over. I've recently broke out with a little searching and money and looking at files. I commend you on your approach to tuning. When you're totally up front with the customer you will thrive. Good job sir
If manufacturers don't want us to reverse engineer their ECUs then they will have to make their own CPUs lol. Compiled codes laid in the ROM are compiled with tools that's made for each CPU. Even if the CPU is new, it will be decompilable soon. Or if it's the CPUs that's been around, then it's most likely to get decompiled when someone wants to. No one can fight that once we get our hands on the ROMs.
WinOLS might not be the tool for reverse engineering, but it's very useful and very well worth it for rom editing. The more you use it, the more useful it is. There are many professional WinOLS users who don't rely on other tuning software anymore, they just use WinOLS. WinOLS is the best automotive hex editor, not just my opinion, just facts.
If you go further with Ghidra or IDA Pro, and you keep digging without stopping, you will find yourself somewhere deep in the rabbit hole without yourself realizing before that exact moment.
I urge you all to keep digging and digging. And then one day, stock ECU tuning can really be truly community driven.
I've been playing with Honda ROMs for a couple of months. I haven't had any experience in tuning and reverse engineering before. Now I can lock the reading through OBD2 port, I can define read keys in Honda ROMs, I can find all the maps in Honda ROMs (that's not Bosch). And I mean I do that accurately. All thanks to the people that I got myself into. That helps accelerate my learning a lot. And I know that it won't take long for you too!
We can even do a turbo tune on stock Honda ECUs without any special tools. Changing map sensor is possible in so many Honda ECUs. MAF scaling is very easy. And tools for reading and writing are widely avilable these days. Datalogging technology is super great these days.
Once you are reverse engineering. You will know what to touch when tuning and what you woudn't want to if you don't know what you are doing. You can even relocate the tuning tables and extend the tables for more tuning refinement, or do a turbo tune in extended tables and axises. You can separate parameters that's being used by different functions to make them independent when you are making custom stuffs. There are many things to see and to learn. And you can really see how manufacturers do things. You will see how every thing is connected together. What this table does, how a function looks up the value it needs to, what sets the data type, where its selected value goes, which ram address it sets, what reads that set ram address, what it uses it for, and so on!
DO NOT STOP DIGGING!
IT WILL ALWAYS GET BETTER EVERY DAY!
How did you learn
Have you got your head in the sand, we have been community tuning the 4g63 and 4bt11 platforms forever.
Hex editors
Ecuflash
Evoscan
We have finally hit a milestone recently in finally cracking the TCU for the Getrag DCT.
Sure Syvecs could manage the DCT befor the community, but as a cummunity we finally acheived it
@@nathanpallavicini6687 Well, I'm happy for Subaru and Mitsubishi tuners that you all got it together since long time ago. Can't say the same for Honda OBD2 (not OBD1).
I needed this comment. Thanks.
@@kensmechanicalaffair same, so refreshing and motivating seeing people banging their head on the same problems that you have
I like his philosophy on locking stuff down, teach people rather than locking them in a master/slave relationship.
Four stroke motocross motorcycles is what we race and the story is the ECU’S are locked and can’t be turned beyond a certain low level that the manufacturer allows/ supplies for the bikes after listening sounds like I need to contact James for the information to make that happen.
Thanks for all your time and help with the black hole of ECU’S
Good video. One correction with an A2L VS HEX file. The a2l is actually the “frame” and the hex is the “data”, so the other way around from mentioned in this video.
Source : I work as an calibration engineer at Bosch
Thank you Garrett. Noted.
I was hired to reflash all of the Astras that came over as Saturn's back in the day. Part of the reason for the reflash specifically was an issue with wipers and electronic noise at certain speeds LOL. This was all done right after the cars left the ships when they were at the vpc's (vehicle preparation centers) I think we did somewhere around 1500.
Super interesting mate! Cheers for sharing that - Taz.
This was a great podcast. It really touched home with me. I have a car equipped with a Megasquirt 1 that i learned on. I have another car that i wanted to MS, but i wanted it to be as reliable as a Toyota. I decided to keep the OBD1 ECU and program it with a chip, dyno tuned by a tuner that has great experience with this model car and tuning strategy. That worked until i found a driving condition that exposed a tuning hole. I also was a little disappointed in the max power output for how i built the car. I suggested MS to my tuner and he is against using standalones for a few reasons, mainly because they take so long to complete. He lives far away and seems uninterested in working with such old tech. I want to take my project tuning into my own hands and get the power i believe that's in it and make it have Toyota manners. Great podcast HPA, Andre and Mr. O'Conner - Pantyeatr1 🏆
Thank you for another great episode. Plenty of acronyms that I never heard before, but at least now I know what I don't know. I hope that the new HPA course will clarify all that.
Thanks for listening and commenting. It certainly will, no acronym left behind in the case of course material 😎 - Taz.
Really interesting could of listen to
This all day
Great podcast.
I used OLS few times (mainly to get initial manufacturer values for some settings), and yes, if you're not aware what you are looking for and where to find it, you could easily get lost into a sea of meaningless hex numbers... Both the strength and weakness of OLS is that it present you all the raw code from a ROM, and permit you to change everything you want... After that it's tuner's responsibility to modify right datas, in meaningful way.
Even can bus fd? Digital networking stuff?
probably my favrioute episode yet! very honest and informative 👌 great stuff guys!
Stoked James and Andre could hit the spot for you mate! We'll have him back on again for sure, so much more to discuss (if he has time for us!) - Taz.
The amount of information in these podcasts are amazing thanks a lot
Thanks for listening!
Thank you for the very informative information! Can anyone recommend a tuning software that will work for a 2007 Mini Cooper S Turbo? HPTuners does not support Mini or BMW.
After listening to this whole podcast, it was a VERY VERY key piece for knowledge!
Cheers for tuning on in. A lot of knowledge crammed into this one! - Taz.
I remember AMD! I tuned a couple of cars on his Maha dyno back in the early 2000s! Sad to hear the owner passed away. 😢
Very cool you've looked into WinOLS now. I remember asking you about 5 years ago for help and you hadn't worked with it much or at all then. I've since stepped away from VAG products and now own a Dodge, so much simpler tuning. Loved the pod and keep up the exceptional work!
Yes it has taken us a while and we hope the demand is there to help those who need the knowledge out. You might own a VW etc in the future again, who knows, although there is more commercial software available for them now than there was 5 years ago too. Not all good though, HP Tuners for examples works on some Mks but not on others despite advertising stating otherwise!
What platform are you using with your Dodge, that is on our list as well probably, via HP Tuners - Taz.
Amazing information probably my favourite podcast from hpa
Thanks for this... Winols never understand it. And tune standalone all day. Seat and listen for 1 hour.
Amazing podcast I always try to catch it‼️
Excellent philosophy expressed here and I don't think it's gonna reduce revenue because often the more people learn the better they appreciate and understand what you're providing and the more they are willing to pay I certainly am ..
Another very interesting pod cast again. Many thanks HPA. James sounds like the guy to tune my 500E Mercedes Bosch LH Jetronic. Just finished building a 6 litre monster with loads of goodies. Was think of going with an after market ECU, but would much sooner go with a modified data on the ECU
So happy to live In Australia after hearing that. One of the best yet👍
Very interesting. Unfortunately it sounds like early OBD2 Toyota guys like me are screwed. 🤷♂️
Very awesome news of the upcoming course !!
listening to while tuning mine edc15+ 1.9tdi in winols (playing in damos and reading Funktionsbeschreibung)
really good makes me wish i had the opportunity to get into decades ago
Where can you get the vis cal logger he was speaking of?
I think this is probably the best place to start looking: www.vehical.net/ - Taz.
Any idea when the winols training will be available? Thanks
2023 😎
I heard that some companies are gonna try and use internet connectivity to refresh the ecu if it detects a change in the rom. I'm interested to see how they plan to do that and how people will overcome that.
lol airplane mode - on
Annnd boom, 'grounded' 😂 These engineers aren't that dumb 😉
On the flipside those in the aftermarket aren't either 😀 - Taz.
These kinds of checks are fairly easy to bypass. Similar things are done in desktop software DRM. You just find the section of code where it stores the home server information and falsify or disable it. Redirect it to a different server that returns a blanket all good signal, etc
To add up on why it's better to teach and share the knowledge, is it's because whatever "secret" you think you came up, it's been discovered already. Especially at this day and age, the improvement are very little that it's as if there is no big difference.
First time caller long time listener, thankyou for these podcasts. Does a tuner without a dyno just chuck 8 bags of spuds in the boot a drive around with the hand brake on?
Cheers for calling on in! Easier to left foot brake, and only 8kg of spuds if you happen to by buying that many at once to stock up the pantry 😅 - Taz.
www.hpacademy.com/previous-webinars/the-key-to-road-tuning-left-foot-braking/?
www.hpacademy.com/blog/was-our-dyno-tuning-accurate-our-fd-rx7-project-ep-3-build/?
13:50 Kolbermoor in Germany - the city of "Lotec" car manufacturer, Kurt Lotterschmid, race driver and the creator of Lotec C1000 and Lotec Sirius !!!
Great, Great podcast that I was hoping would not end! 👍👍
Glad you enjoyed it! We'll talk to James again at some stage, still so many topics we'd love to get his insight on 😎 - Taz.
great potcast :) I coun't catch the name of the turkish software for data logging. Could somebody share it ?
VehCAL, something like that... 🤔
Thank you , great info
Listening from South Africa, thanks for sharing the knowledge
Great to hear from you as always mate, cheers for coming back for more podcasts and hope you're keeping well =) - Taz.
Mannnn this guy is smart!
James has certainly put in the hours to gain the knowledge he has! - Taz.
Does anyone have some link for the logger company he mentioned? Via cal or something like that?
vehiCAL
@@darkcashyz Awesome. Thanks
www.vehical.net/
@@hpa101 Thank you. Already working with it! You cant imagine how helpful it was :D
What about jzs161. I can't find anyone to tune the stock, ecu.and apparently stand alone wont work with my climate control. Any suggestions?
1:30:00 bflash and autotuner released it :)
Teny told we can remap any equipment with an ECU the question how to extract the files from differents ECU?
You need an interface tool which extracts and writes the data from and to the ECU and these will generally make the required checksum corrections for you too, although you can use 3rd party services for this too if required for any reason.
If you were using something like HP Tuners, their MVPI device does all these things for you.
For WinOLS we can use things like PCMFlash with a Tactrix cable or the likes of Autotuner and bFlash if we're commercial users (they come at a commercial user price).
Since this podcast was recorded we now offer this course FYI. It might be something you find useful: www.hpacademy.com/courses/winols-mastery-map-identification-and-editing/? - Taz
can u make toyota diesel stage 3
The guy who was charging me 1000 usda a car never shared shit with me and ripped me off when he sold me software what a toxic type of person especially after we did business together for 3 years!
I have an FC3S TII rom chip if someone wants. For S5. You pay shipping.
Just as it gets tougher and tougher to root our phones, (maybe no longer possible?) Something similar will likely happen with the car computers. Now we'll have KNOX running on our cars.
Vehical is a estonian company
Maybe its just me. But I think it would add a massive amount if you could get yourself and the guest on camera. Let us in your zoom/skype call.
Soooooo toyota and lexus? lol
Right, damn.