Hi together

Im a really newbee in Ecu Flash. My question is: Does the Ecu Flash can show u how mani times a rom has been flashed and where i can find that?

Thanks a lot

Regards

Pascal

 

up

 

nope - you cant tell.

we suspect even Mitsubishi can't tell.

 

The other importat quesiton will be how many times can you Flash an EVO ECU? Is there a limit for that? I have read that the limit is 100 but that does not make a lot of sense since it should be an EEPROM and it shoult be way more than a 100. Anyone?

 

i do not believe its eeprom, i'm pretty sure its flash memory. MJ should know - since he has a benchtop ECU test setup.

There are theoretical limits to flash memory - but until someone starts getting some sort of corruption - we're likely to never find out the practical limits of reflashing. Especially since we don't reflash the entire memory at once - only the blocks that have changed from the original flash.


edit: looks like the write process is not byte granular - whole blocks need to be rewritten.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

 

Yes, you re-write blocks at a time, but not the entire 512 every time. It's pretty easy to follow the blocks being written in ECUFlash.

I've heard that many chips similar to the ones in our ECUs can be written over 10,000 or 100,000 times. If you reach that limit on an automotive ECU you're a mad man. You'd have to flash the entire ROM 2 times every day for nearly 14 years to reach 10,000 flashes.

 

Hitachi guarantee that it will survive 100 writes.

However there are people with upto 1000 flashes...

 

I heard that it's possible to look how many times the ECU have been loged, using EcuTek. Is this really posible?

 

loged? what u mean

 

Sorry. I mean its possible to see how many times a rom was flashed on the ECU.

I heard that from a Tuner who Flash with EcuTek

 

Isn't this pretty easy to prove or disprove by simply doing a hex compare after flashing the ROM?

Unless a counter is kept somewhere else that isn't read when reading the ROM, just do a compare after flashing the car and see what has changed. See if a bit that you haven't changed with the flash has changed.

 

nah it wouldn't be stored in the ROM.

Perhaps there is a secret bit in the EEPROM/FLASH that contains the number of flashes. But it would only be accessable to someone with very specialised gear.

Or I could be %100 wrong :P

 

Do you have the part number for the Hitachi ECU chip? I will be interested to take a look at the datasheet.

 

SH7055 or 72 for 7/8

 

Wow ... it is 100 times. I've flashed my car probably 400 times or more ... I've got 61 revisions to my ROM not counting race maps and I've flashed each one at least 3 or 4 times easy. ECUFlash has given me a write error once and then worked fine on the next attempt.