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I Didn't Want To Pay a Tuner so I Spent 2x The Time and Money Doing it Myself - DIY ECU Remapping

Become a member: https://www.youtube.com/@d4a/join Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/d4a Resources from the video Amazon MPPS: https://amzn.to/4bCl09U (I get a small commission) ECU Connections Forum: https://www.ecuconnections.com/forum/ (you need to register and do 1 introductory post in the introduce yourself section) Smart Roadster 2006 Original Map: https://www.ecuconnections.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=356795&hilit=371568#p356795 MPPS Boot Mode Pinouts Connections: https://www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/topic3649127.html Tom's Turbo Garage: https://tomsgarage.work/ I own a 2005 Smart Roadster and for a while now I wanted to remap the ECU of this car to improve its performance, and more importantly it’s shifting, because this car has a semi-automatic transmission, or to be more accurate, an automated manual. It’s essentially a manual transmission with a clutch and gears and synchros. But there’s no clutch pedal. Instead there’s motors and servos that do the clutching and declutching and the shifting And these motors are controlled by an ECU. This is a car that is incredibly fun to drive but that driving experience is sadly sometimes ruined by the clumsy and slow shifting. So I thought that I could remap the ECU to improve the shifting and also make a bit more power in the process. Now, I have installed a standalone ECU in the past and I have written VE, target afr, ignition, boost control and other maps from scratch. So I thought, hey, how hard can it be to just modify existing factory maps? I’ll just do a bit of research, buy some basic tools to tap into it, i’ll find the right maps and then I’ll just change the values myself. How hard can it be? So once I got my tools the first step was to actually read the data from my ECU so that I could modify it. After doing some initial research online I have found that to remap an ECU myself I will need at a bare minimum these three tools. 1. Old Windows 7 Laptop 2. Car battery charger 3. MPPS ECU flashing tool The process goes like this. We read what's on the ECU, we then modify that and then we write back the tuned map onto the ECU. To read ECU data you first need hookup your car battery to a charger. This is needed because it keeps the voltage stable. If the voltage goes below 12 volts while remapping an ECU you risk bricking your ECU. Next up you need to locate the OBD port and plug the MPPS into the OBD port. Next plug the laptop in and connect the mpps to the laptop. Install the drivers and open the MPPS software. Unfortunately not all ECUs can be read, in many cases there are special protections that the MPPS system cannot bypass. So what I did instead is that I searched online and eventually found an original improved shifting map on the forums. I then opened it in Winols and later in TunerPro and tried to find the right maps to modified. Eventually I gave up and bough a tuned file online just to see what was modified. This file then ended up bricking my ECU. After this I had to figure out how to put it in boot mode with MPPS in order to restore the ECU and bring it back to life. After figuring that out I decided to see what was modified in the tuned map. Only 9 maps. Ultimately I found a specialist for my platform that remote flashed my ECU with his original map which I also inspected to find 69 modified maps. Back in the day of the carburetor tuning required an actual physical and sensory connection with the machine. You used your hands and basic tools to tune a carburetor. You would turn screws to change the amount of fuel coming into the engine. You would twist the distributor with your hands to set ignition timing. The machine was built and adapted to human capabilities. But with the advent of electronic fuel injection the word tuning gained another meaning. To tune a modern machine we must adapt ourselves to it. We need to be able to read, interpret and write its language. The physical and sensory connection is no longer a part of the tuning experience, now we change numbers in a table while sitting at a computer. Tuning can be done remotely, you can increase the horsepower of a car or motorcycle on the other end of the world. This is very illustrative of the increasingly digitlazed reality we live in. A special thank you to my patrons: Daniel Peter Della Flora valqk Dave Westwood Zwoa Meda Beda Cole Philips Allan Mackay Sam Lutfi Alex 00:00 The Motivation 00:56 The Tools Needed 03:08 The Grayness 06:29 The Connections and the Problem 09:36 ECU Hardware and Software Numbers 12:24 Winols and TunerPro 14:38 How Many Maps Are Inside a Factory ECU? 16:13 Buy a Tuned Map Online 17:53 Bricking My ECU 19:30 What's Inside a Tuned ECU Map? 20:38 Reviving a Bricked ECU using MPPS Boot Mode 23:03 Limp Mode/ Safe Mode 25:36 Finding a Specialist 29:27 Is this Tuning? #d4a #ecu #remapped