Hi everyone, Hoping for some expert guidance. Battling with a RHD UK 2001 360 Modena (manual). It had an intermittent CEL for multiple cylinder misfire with codes showing misfires on 5,6,7,8 (Passenger side on a RHD). Runs beautifully when its running right. As of this morning, it would start on all 8...then was cutting out as soon as trying to move it. After which it would only start on 4. Long story short after a bit of head scratching and process of elimination I swapped the ECUs side to side and hey presto the fault carried. Now 1,2,3,4 not running but 5,6,7,8 are. The diagnostic can still communicate with both ecus (although sluggishly with the suspect one) and its throwing some random faults which I think are nonsense. P1199 and P1269. Firstly if the fault is carrying, it has to be the ECU that is at fault no? Sounds obvious I know but wanted to be sure I wasnt going mad. Secondly, the duff ECU is the 5,6,7,8 ecu - which I think is Slave? Master is drivers side in a RHD I believe (again not sure). Is there anything I can do short of buying a fresh virgin ECU for a 360 Manual? Anyone repair this sort of thing? I used to work for an electronics ECU repair company so understand the challenge of hybrid pcbs etc so am assuming no bueno on this....but hoping things may have moved on. A penny and a lot of thanks for your thoughts in advance.
If it goes with the ECU, it's the ECU faults. When installed, the ECUs function as Master (B1) or Slave (B2), but you can swap it left to right and the names stay with the bank, not with the ECU. When buying new ECU, you need to buy a "virgin" ECU to go into the right bank so that it will marry itself to the Immobilizer. Once it does that, it cannot be recognized by any other immobilizer unless it becomes a virgin again. There are some outfit in SoCall and in Florida that can repair the 360 ECUs but there is no guaranty that they can "really" repair what is bad with your ECU. It seems they just change some capacitors and reflow some solder and think that is good enough -- it's not. You would really have to find someone that can run "emulation" on the ECU to find out what is wrong with the board before you can fix it. There are very few of us that have this capability at this point.
if i remmber correctly one ecu takes care of all the showing of 8 cylinders' misfire. so nothing to do with ecu
Not true. Each ECU will monitor the four cylinders for that bank. Once a misfire is detected in bank 2, it reports the misfire to the Master ECU so that the Master ECU can report that error code to the single entity SMOG computer on the CAN bus. I have access to the 360 CEL error code map that shows which ECU is monitoring which error codes.
i see, so that means I should modify my writing as: " one ecu shows all the misfires, the other ecu won't show it, although it detects it"
It's possible to clone your old existing ECU flash and eeprom onto any other known good 360 ECU. You don't need to buy a virgin ECU. I managed to do it on my car, I now have 2 replacement second hand ECU's running the car and my originals are tucked away safely. All immo codes and paramaters copied across no problem.
Can you describe the process? Is it a DIY friendly process that requires simple instruction and equipment? Or does it require flash reader, interface board, power supplies, custom wirings, custom connectors, a knowledge of reverse assembler and some coding ability, plus a BSEE to operate it all?
Not at all DIY, it's very easy to brick the ECU unless you know exactly what you're doing. But a number of people on this forum have the knowledge and tools to do it.
Rod Drew at Francorchamps of America can help. 949-631-6373 He has re-programed bad ECUs for me before.
Even this isn't entirely correct. This described operation actually depends on the firmware software version, some early versions of firmware did not report any detonation faults at all which is frankly terrifying, some only reported RHS and the last final software revisions reported the full ticket of faults. Typically the software got better for the last cars released. It is why I often now produce a hybrid custom firmware which incorporates the best latest and final software versions updates, refinements and bug fixes possible (all the final updates) with the required software changes necessary to make it backwards compatible with older models, I.e. your specific differences unique to your assy number, engine number, etc. I wrote all the custom tools necessary to do this so I can safely say I'm probably the only one in the world right now having the ability to accomplish this in an automated fashion, that's fully tested, safe and reliable. I've even pulled in some bug fixes from the later revisions used on F430 firmware.
