Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesm
Still, it beats ecutek's bend-over licensing scheme by a mile. The idea that I can pay a tuner and hourly rate, to tune my specific vehicle on a dyno in person (a bespoke tune, not canned and resold) then somehow not own the product of that work is absurd. If I pay for labor, I own the fruit of it. If I have two BRZ's with the same mods, I should be able to flash MY map to both for the cost of producing the single map. But I can't, because with ecutek you own nothing, they're just letting you use it under their terms.
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That's not 100% true... what you pay EcuTek for is the cable and license for the ECU (one per car/ecu). Your tuner could happily generate another ROM file for you to run on a second/third/whatever car. EcuTek doesn't control the ROM file at all, that's up to the tuner. So yes, you need another license but you wouldn't have to pay full price for a second tune.
That said, if you're getting a custom tune, you *should* have the second car custom tuned as well since no two cars are going to behave identically.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ft_sjo
EcuTek exists to protect the tuner's IP, which is fair enough. You don't own a tuner's calibration, you're just licensed to use it.
If you don't like that then you have to tune it yourself.
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Kinda this, I'd say you own the calibration, but it's an encrypted version of it so you can't modify it in any way. You can flash between it and other tunes freely though if you have a cable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by arghx7
Having used the commercial-grade OEM tools (Caldesk, INCA, etc) and certain in-house tools I can say that I can EASILY see if anyone has changed something from the production calibration.
First, there can be a software build version into the code that has been flashed onto the ECU. So for example, if the manufacturer changes the spark table from a 10x10 to 16x16, a new software version will be released. That's what moves around a bunch of the memory addresses so that some reverse engineering would need to be re-done on newer model years. Then there are checksum addresses that can be matched to the library of production calibrations. No match = tampering. Now maybe ECUtek basically leaves those in such a state that it hides the change. I'm not an expert on that.
All that's academic and has very little bearing on ECUtek vs BRZedit. But I can tell you right now that Toyota and Subaru have a handful of guys outside of Japan who have access to the tools and information needed to determine tampering. I can't speak for every dealer tool though. From my experience with using dealer tools, they are designed to be idiot proof. You plug into the customer car and it will just update it to whatever the library in the tool specifies. Those libraries can change all the time because the dealer tools require regular updates from the internet. I presume Techstream is like that.
The way it works in at the OEM's is that the actual software code (Matlab Simulink models etc) is kept under very tight security. By that I mean, very few people know exactly how everything is calculated, and often they are not the ones doing the tuning hands on. The tools needed to access the ECU, the memory address files (ASAP2 .A2L format usually), and the actual ROM binary have a little wider availability. It's typically on a need-to-know basis though.
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What if you flash back to the OEM ROM, can anything be detected as tampering then? I remember reading about the flash count not being updated by the EcuTek flashing process so you can flash between tunes and stock as much as you want but the flash count wouldn't be effected. I've also read that some tuners will update the flash count as needed in case the ecu was flashed by a dealership.