The beginning of the end for ECU tuning?

[tabasco122]

bump, i still read your thread every now and then to look at the updates lol.

[Chris95RT]

Man I have bricked so many MCUs this last year fucking with this stuff accidentally, or having a compiler put code where it shant.

It may be unpopular here, but I still welcome it- it sucks to lose the ability to fuck with your stuff, but the amount of people that beat on their cars and then fuck something up, and try to get letiguous with the OEM outweighs the people who want to learn; imo.

[Jeff V.]

It'll be interesting to see how many otherwise perfectly good cars get rendered useless by unsupported or inaccessible diagnostic and programming utilities in the coming years.

[Chris GTO TT]

The concern I have is cars will end up like John Deere Tractors. If you do an unsupported repair without the magical multi thousand dollar diagnostic tool it basically triggers a check engine light. From what I remember even some standard maintenance items trigger the system.

[ChargerX3]

You have a tractor?

[alienviking]

Bad example - no farmer will ever have the time to do his own maintenance anyway!

[Chris GTO TT]

[quote=""ChargerX3""]You have a tractor?[/quote]
No just read a few articles a while ago talking about how tightly locked down their newer equipment is.
[quote=""alienviking""]Bad example - no farmer will ever have the time to do his own maintenance anyway! [/quote]

Lol it was them and the independent shops complaining about it.

[aaronatstate]

So what's the latest with the ZR1?

[Chris95RT]

[quote=""Chris GTO TT""]The concern I have is cars will end up like John Deere Tractors. If you do an unsupported repair without the magical multi thousand dollar diagnostic tool it basically triggers a check engine light. From what I remember even some standard maintenance items trigger the system.[/quote]

I don't think that'll happen, the two industries are a little different from their use case to their implementation.

You basically have the ag industry dominated by JD, and construction dominated by Cat- they both run their own proprietary everything.

The automotive industry is regulated by a company agnostic conglomerate (SAE, CARB, NHTSA) and the people who develop those are from multiple different companies. I would be hard pressed to see any one incur the cost increase from a supplier to make something so proprietary, and possibly break a law, that you would need something individually designed to a specific OEM.

Just my thoughts.

[Duck Vader]

[quote=""alienviking""]Bad example - no farmer will ever have the time to do his own maintenance anyway! [/quote]

Issue I see from reading up on this before is what happens if the tractor goes down in the middle of the field? Now the farmer can't work on his own tractor to get it back running to finish the work or in some cases even get him back home if far from home and bad weather is coming in.

[Chris95RT]

[quote=""Jeff V.""]It'll be interesting to see how many otherwise perfectly good cars get rendered useless by unsupported or inaccessible diagnostic and programming utilities in the coming years.[/quote]

Could you elaborate on the scenario you're envisioning? I just don't see the doom and gloom aspect where a car becomes recyclable because it becomes unhackable.

[Jeff V.]

ZR1 is still locked down. One shop is finally offering a solution for the L5P diesels, but you have to send them an ECM to physically modify. It's $2500 plus the licensing for the software. I'm guessing they're just replacing the main processor with one that has their own known security keys.

I spend my days at work with systems from a dozen different vendors, and everything works together because the protocols are public and standardized. All this proprietary car software is horseshit. The only reason they do it is to force service work to their parasitic and often incompetent dealers.

[ChargerX3]

Most farmers dont know anything about ECU tuning anyways. Plus with Tier IV Final emissions you can really mess an engine up fast. Hell, I have a construction client trying to bypass his DPF at the moment because he doesn't want to deal with the hassle. Sure, go blow copious amounts of soot and NOx into the atmosphere. Oh, and you're also risking state and Federal offenses by doing so.

[Chris95RT]

The problem isn’t limited to traditional home electronics. A farmer may have paid for his or her John Deere tractor, a piece of farm equipment that can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But John Deere still owns the software that runs the tractor, and trying to fix it without going to an authorized repair center could put the farmer afoul of copyright laws. This means that, in order to make legal repairs, a farmer in a rural area might have to haul a broken 15-ton tractor for hundreds of miles to an authorized dealer or repair shop. In the harvest season, this could mean a crushing loss of revenue.

In my point of view, a small but very important difference.

In the automotive market, your car does something you don't like and it costs too much to fix it you either a) Pony the money up or b) Don't and you then c) don't buy that car again. The pressures of a free market, and the fact there's something like 10+ automotive OEMs to choose from have allowed us to have OBD and codes that are standard across the automotive industry.

A P-code for a DTC will be the same across all OEMs, and I guess until I see a drastic departure from that I'm skeptical of the doom and gloom scenario.

In the farm industry you don't have that luxury, or much of a regulatory board- JD owns you, and owns your machinery and seems to be the result of no competition. But even in that point, I don't see any stories about tractors breaking down in the middle of the field; doing stupid shit yes, not not breaking down.

[Chris GTO TT]

Sure but auto manufacturers already have tried to get devices that read their code declared illegal via DMCA

[Jeff V.]

Could you elaborate on the scenario you're envisioning? I just don't see the doom and gloom aspect where a car becomes recyclable because it becomes unhackable.

My sister in law had a 98 Mercedes wagon. It was worth, at best, $2000. She had to replace the key for it. This was a $300 part, only available from Mercedes. Not only was that a significant portion of the car's value, but what happens when Mercedes eventually discontinues support for that model of car and/or key?

Right now you can't get new ABS controllers and steering position sensors for the C5 Corvette. The hardware is out of production, old units can't be rebuilt because the electronic specs aren't available. Even if you could get a part, you'd need to take them to a dealer to be programmed, or invest in hundreds of dollars of equipment and software subscriptions to program it yourself.

[Chris95RT]

[quote=""Jeff V.""]ZR1 is still locked down. One shop is finally offering a solution for the L5P diesels, but you have to send them an ECM to physically modify. It's $2500 plus the licensing for the software. I'm guessing they're just replacing the main processor with one that has their own known security keys.

I spend my days at work with systems from a dozen different vendors, and everything works together because the protocols are public and standardized. All this proprietary car software is horseshit. The only reason they do it is to force service work to their parasitic and often incompetent dealers.[/quote]

Protocols that allow you to read the diagnostics are agnostic to the OEM and controlled by a 3rd party; maybe not to the extent that the internet has it, but we're talking about two different things.

But counterpoint, if Lenovo or Cisco decide to put a backdoor in your routers MPU allowing someone access, let me know how it goes trying to fix the ROM on that.

And in addition routers and consumer grade electronics are disposable commodities, the amount of error proofing that goes into everything is multiple decades below which that goes into cars. You fuck up a router, you get no internet, you fuck up the ADAS system you drive into a truck.

I dunno man, I understand the concern I just can't throw all my weight behind the worse case scenario yet.

[Jeff V.]

The pressures of a free market, and the fact there's something like 10+ automotive OEMs to choose from have allowed us to have OBD and codes that are standard across the automotive industry.

A P-code for a DTC will be the same across all OEMs, and I guess until I see a drastic departure from that I'm skeptical of the doom and gloom scenario.

OBD2 and CANbus standardization was forced on them by the government. Even then, it's only for emissions stuff. Good luck finding generic tools that can do all the other codes in the car. That's just diagnostics. You still need paywalled access to the OEM programming tools to replace the failed parts.

But counterpoint, if Lenovo or Cisco decide to put a backdoor in your routers MPU allowing someone access, let me know how it goes trying to fix the ROM on that.

Don't side track the issue here. We're talking about regular service and repair of failed components. Not some espionage bullshit.

[Chris95RT]

[quote=""Chris GTO TT""]Sure but auto manufacturers already have tried to get devices that read their code declared illegal via DMCA[/quote]

From what I've read it wasn't limiting access to diagnostic information, it was limiting access to the software that made up the control of the diagnostic information.

A la the emissions scandal from VW.

[Chris95RT]

[quote=""Jeff V.""]OBD2 and CANbus standardization was forced on them by the government. Even then, it's only for emissions stuff. Good luck finding generic tools that can do all the other codes in the car. That's just diagnostics. You still need paywalled access to the OEM programming tools to replace the failed parts.



Don't side track the issue here. We're talking about regular service and repair of failed components. Not some espionage bullshit.[/quote]

I'm not, but I'm trying to point out that inside the part you're just as locked out of your phone and your routers as you are your car.

Outside the part, is another story.

If you wanted to upgrade your processor on your router by reflowing your own apps processor down, to get better performance out of it- you can't, they won't let you, nor will they tell you how to do it.

And CAN wasn't forced on anyone, it was an industry wide decision to go to that interface just as it will be to move to ethernet due to bandwidth and data constraints; the implementation of the protocol in software however is OEM specific. OBD was however.