OP
OP
TheLion
Well-Known Member
- Thread starter
- #76
I'm not sure what you mean by "signature", but I can generalize the following: the ECU/PCM is just a micro controller based system, to my knowledge there is nothing special about it. It's programmed in ANSI C or possibly C++ / C Sharp, it has multiple General Purpose IO (GPIO), Pulse Width Modulation (PWM), Analog to Digital Converters (ADC's), possibly Digital to Analog Converters (DAC's), CAN bus controllers, probably I2C bus for external memory (external to the uC, but still on the same circuit board). These are all pretty standard things, the program is stored in the FLASH or EEPROM depending on what your doing with it and the particular uC architecture.
It's possible there is a co-processor which performs secondary tasks, such as controlling the automatic transmission, but with speeds in the 100's of MHz and single clock execution of standard C instructions I think that's much less common except in may trucks due to the application. Technically you could pull the Ford Racing tune, but you would need to know the exact compiler and development environment used to re-construct the program into human readable form, otherwise your literally pulling kilobytes or megabytes of 1's and 0's which you could not possibly make sense of. Alternatively if you had the source files from the development environment, which is the program in human readable form, you could easily edit anything you like, compile it and flash the uC with the new hex file.
There's quite a few out there, Microchip MPLab X, Atmel AVR Studio, I forget the typical one that ARM uses for their own processors, but those are just examples. BTW many of the Mircochip and Atmel processors actually use ARM cores, but then build up their own peripherals (all the fun sounding words above like PWM). I guess to answer your question simplistically, you would need the source files, the compiler and development environment to edit them properly and generate a functional Hex file to actually program into the uC. Some one who has an open line of communications with the OE could probably do that, but we little "customers" probably would have quite a time doing so.
Although, if anyone has a fried PCM, if you take it apart and send me photos of the circuit board, in particular the larger surface mount chips with lots of pins I could at least find out some details on the processor specs. My PCM housing said Bosch on it, so I wonder if Ford is using off-the shelf PCM's developed by Bosh and then writing their own software? It would make sense as there is a huge cost and time associated with developing the hardware alone, let alone the complex layers of software.
It's possible there is a co-processor which performs secondary tasks, such as controlling the automatic transmission, but with speeds in the 100's of MHz and single clock execution of standard C instructions I think that's much less common except in may trucks due to the application. Technically you could pull the Ford Racing tune, but you would need to know the exact compiler and development environment used to re-construct the program into human readable form, otherwise your literally pulling kilobytes or megabytes of 1's and 0's which you could not possibly make sense of. Alternatively if you had the source files from the development environment, which is the program in human readable form, you could easily edit anything you like, compile it and flash the uC with the new hex file.
There's quite a few out there, Microchip MPLab X, Atmel AVR Studio, I forget the typical one that ARM uses for their own processors, but those are just examples. BTW many of the Mircochip and Atmel processors actually use ARM cores, but then build up their own peripherals (all the fun sounding words above like PWM). I guess to answer your question simplistically, you would need the source files, the compiler and development environment to edit them properly and generate a functional Hex file to actually program into the uC. Some one who has an open line of communications with the OE could probably do that, but we little "customers" probably would have quite a time doing so.
Although, if anyone has a fried PCM, if you take it apart and send me photos of the circuit board, in particular the larger surface mount chips with lots of pins I could at least find out some details on the processor specs. My PCM housing said Bosch on it, so I wonder if Ford is using off-the shelf PCM's developed by Bosh and then writing their own software? It would make sense as there is a huge cost and time associated with developing the hardware alone, let alone the complex layers of software.
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