ECU Re-flashing without opening the enclosure

Hi guys,
Thought I would share with you what I was up to yesterday. I'm helping out a guy in China with the manual conversion of his 599- I've been doing the ecu re-flashing for him with the ecu whisperer 360trev doing the clever firmware correction part. Trouble is, because of the GTO parts that the owner has on his car, we're not hopeful that the new flash will be right first time. All things can be done, but this one will probably take a little bit of trial and error.

Clearly its no good sending the ecu's back and forward from China to the UK, so I wanted to make the ecu's easy to reflash for the owner. Unless you have the seedkey, then flashing is done by putting the ecu into whats called "boot mode". This is like a backdoor in the ecu that allows it to be started up using a boot loader over the K-line rather than using its own normal onboard firmware. This allows you to easily read and write to the flash / eeprom memory chips. On the 430/575/612/599 ecu's, you access boot mode by grounding the boot pin via a 10K ohm resistor for several seconds when it first starts. This involve opening up the ecu and directly accessing the pad on the ecu. Its a little bit of a faff, and certainly the scariest part of the process.

What I did then was to modify the ecu's by making this something that can be done without having to open the ecu's. Its simply a push to make switch that connects the ground strip on the PCB with the boot pin, via a 10k resistor. All protected with heat shrink and held in place with hot glue. The switch sits inside the square envelope of the ecu, so shouldn't be depressed whilst in the car, and in any case will be ignored once the ecu has started up.

For anyone out there thinking about flashing their ecu's with a performance tune, then the diagram below shows the location of the boot pad and the wiring you need to connect with your chosen flashing tool. I recommend Ktag - you'll be able to get a cheap clone on ebay for about £50.

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Hi taz, the sealant Bosch use is non-setting, so you honestly don’t need to replace it. Doesn’t matter if an ecu has been opened a dozen times, you always have to pull quite hard to separate the two parts of the enclosure.

Of topic, you can see on the sticker attached inside the ecu that it states 7.1.1, even though this is from a 599 which are supposed to be all 7.3.2, and which if you interrogate the Rom using 360trev’s tool, it self identifies as a 7.3.2. In practice, the reality is that they are all the same thing. My totally unproven theory is that Ferrari were saying one thing, and bosch, who would have had guys working inside Ferrari, were saying something else, hence the official literature uses both numbers.



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Taz - what I'm saying is that all 612's and 599's (including GTO, which I have a copy of the firmware of now) are stated as both 7.1.1. and 7.3.2 depending on where you look. The software tools all use the flashing mode for 7.3.2, and thats what the firmware self identities as, but the ecu's are variously marked with labels inside and out with 7.1.1. There was a minor update to some 599 ecu's that got a different Bosch part number, but they still run the 7.3.2/7.1.1 firmware.

Qtr - I think its fair to say that for 599/612, there are still a few area where 360trev is exploring, and certainly there are always functions that he's working on to automate. In principle however, he has achieved a level of command over these ecu's that is only comparable with the original Bosch engineers. This is well removed from most tuners, who are using tools like WinOLS to try to find and interpret tables in the firmware without any real understanding of all the control functions they impact.

On the gauge cluster, I know some guy have downloaded the flash file on the cluster, and I've been messing about downloading the eeprom (useful in case you ever need to replace your gauge cluster and very easy), so I guess its all doable. This is speculation, but you would expect that the coding for the graphics to be on the flash, and all the settings for your car on the eeprom. So I would also expect that you could either get a later cluster and load it with a download from your existing eeprom, or load your flash file with one from a later car. I actually prefer the bar charts, as you get three gauges (oil pressure, oil temp and water temp) rather than just two with the gauges.