WinOLS Mastery: Map Identification & Editing: Step 1: Bench Read ECU
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Step 1: Bench Read ECU
06.56
| 00:00 | The first step of our process is to read the information out of the ECU and of course we're doing this in two ways, starting with a read directly from the ECU on the bench. |
| 00:09 | Now, there is a little bit of work involved in retrieving the ECU out of the car. |
| 00:14 | In the Q7, the master ECU is actually relatively simple to extract. |
| 00:19 | As I mentioned already in the introduction, it's located on the passenger's side of the vehicle under the scuttle panel for left hand drive vehicles, ours of course being left hand drive, it's on the driver's side. |
| 00:31 | The scuttle panel actually has a really simple pull up feature that makes access to the ECU very easy, then the ECU is located with two plastic tabs, all you need to do is gently pry those out of the way with your thumbs and the ECU will be free. |
| 00:45 | There is a catch however, if the ECU hasn't previously been tuned, then there is a cage around the ECU header plug that makes it impossible to remove the connectors from the ECU. |
| 00:57 | And these use a couple of security screws to make it difficult to tamper with. |
| 01:01 | There are a couple of ways of dealing with this but the simplest way that I've found is to use a small die grinder with a cut off wheel and basically cut a slot into the head of the security screw, once you've done that you can then remove those screws carefully using a conventional screwdriver. |
| 01:18 | You can of course replace this cage once the tune is complete if you wish, in our case we are going to leave those cages removed. |
| 01:26 | Once we've got the ECU out of the vehicle we can get it located onto our bench and in this case we can also see on the ECU itself we've got the model or family of ECU, in this case EDC17CP44. |
| 01:43 | We're using our AutoTuner tool here to make this read so what we're going to do is jump into our software here and we can see we've got a range of options. |
| 01:52 | So, at the bottom we can see we've already got our previous reads, which were on this particular ECU but for the sake of completeness, let's start from scratch and we're going to do this by clicking on ECU operations. |
| 02:05 | Here we need to select the type of vehicle, obviously this is a passenger car. |
| 02:09 | And then we need to find Audi in our list here , which of course is right here. |
| 02:15 | We click on Audi, we then need to scroll through what is a fairly extensive list until we find what we're looking for here, which is this one here, Audi Q7 2010. |
| 02:27 | So, we'll click on that. |
| 02:29 | Then we need to select the specific controller that we want to read and as I've already mentioned this is an EDC17CP44, that's the one there. |
| 02:38 | Also shows us the range of options for reading and writing, so we'll click on that. |
| 02:43 | In this case we do have the ability to read and write via bench, boot or OBD modes. |
| 02:49 | In this case of course we are starting with our bench mode so we'll click on that. |
| 02:53 | We obviously now need the instructions to know exactly what we're actually going to do with our jumper cables here and how to connect these up and we can find that here in Auto Tuner by clicking on the little instructions tab. |
| 03:06 | That'll open up a full list of instructions on how to deal with this specific ECU. |
| 03:11 | Including the location of the ECU, which we've already mentioned here. |
| 03:15 | This is very complete and makes this quite simple, shows you the required accessories for this read or write and then the steps. |
| 03:24 | What we're really interested in here though is this section, which shows us the ECU header plug and of course colour coded in terms of, which jumper we need to connect to which of these pins. |
| 03:36 | As usual, really really important to be very careful and precise with this, making sure that we have actually connected it to the correct pins. |
| 03:44 | It's always a good idea to double check your work. |
| 03:47 | And once we've got that connected, which we have, we can close that down and then we want to click on the read ECU tool tab here. |
| 03:56 | We've got the option here for our normal read so this is important, as we mentioned, this ECU has previously been tuned and we want to retain that data. |
| 04:04 | We're not going to get that data with a virtual read, so we do want to do a normal read. |
| 04:09 | And then we need to give the file a name. |
| 04:14 | While AutoTuner has suggested a name for this file, which we absolutely can use. |
| 04:18 | We're going to use our normal naming strategy, which is the registration HGY656 and then we'll add Audi Q7 and then we will add bench and tuned. |
| 04:32 | This will just give us some information on this file at a later point. |
| 04:36 | We can now click save and the read will continue, which is going to take a little bit of time. |
| 04:41 | So, we'll just go through this process now. |
| 04:44 | Alright, we've got our read complete there, took just under 42 seconds, so a relatively quick process. |
| 04:50 | So, we've now got a full backup of that ECU so if we do have problems with the ECU becoming unresponsive as we move through the rest of our process, we do have a point to come back to and recover and of course now we've got that existing tuned file out of the ECU, so once we've completed everything that we're going to do in this worked example, we can flash this back into the ECU and it's going to be exactly as the vehicle was when it was delivered. |
| 05:14 | Also worth just mentioning again here, remembering that this is a master and slave ECU arrangement, so if we do need to make tuning changes and we're going to be doing this with a bench flash, we will need to flash both the master and the slave ECU. |
| 05:30 | I won't cover this, because the process is exactly the same, however we just need to extract that second ECU. |
| 05:38 | With our bench read complete we're then going to go and reinstall that ECU back into the vehicle so we can complete an OBD2 read, which will be a virtual read. |
| 05:47 | The process here is simply to connect this time our OBD2 adapter to the auto tuner device, we want to make sure that the vehicle battery is in good condition, we want to make sure that our laptop is connected to mains power, so we don't have any risk of the laptop going flat during this read. |
| 06:07 | The process here is essentially the same as what you've just seen. |
| 06:11 | However,, instead of selecting the bench read protocol, we will be selecting the OBD2 protocol. |
| 06:18 | Again we need to give the file a sensible name, obviously this time we're going to add OBD2 instead of bench and this of course will be a stock or virtual read file. |
| 06:29 | We'll go through that process and read that file, the auto tuner tool does tell us that this is a virtual read, hence the read time is relatively quick, because it is simply extracting this file from a server on the internet. |
| 06:42 | Once we've got that complete we can then disconnect from the vehicle, we've got all of our information read both via bench and OBD2 and we can move onto the next step of our process. |
