A quick question about a concern a fellow co-worker brought up.

I forget what car he had, maybe a mustang? Anyways. He said he got a flasher for his car. He needed some warranty work done, and when he took it in the dealership said that the ECM flash count didnt match their previous records, and so would not cover the costs.

Is this something to worry about with the AP? I am not too concerned as my RX8 just got out of warranty.

But it may be a concern for new owners?

 

before you visit a dealership, reflash to your stock map.
If the dealership tries to flash your car, they will not be able to with the AP maps so that's why you switch back.

 

no.

your post is the king of fail..

beers

 

How is your car out of warranty? I had 57k miles on my car. I figured the warranty was up at 60k, so I went FI. When I got home from my FI vacation, I had a package from Mazda. Inside was a letter explaining that the warranty for RX8's up to '07 (I think) has been extended to 100k. There was also a dvd inside, which I haven't watched yet...

 

Well, its been confirmed that OEM RX-8 ECU will not accept more then 100 Flashes. I am not sure if this is applicable for AP but pretty sure it is the case with other Flash tuning softwares and even with Mazda MMP tool.

 

Expound please.

 

According to Hymee, there is a flash counter built into the ECU which keeps track of the number of flashes and also limits it to 100. The manual for the main processor in the PCM confirms it also.

 

I this is some non-volatile memory or can it be over written?

 

It could be a "safety" feature put into the PCM to keep it from being flashed to the point where the memory starts failing.

Flash memory can only be written so many times... typically the memory integrated into a chipset has worse write endurance than say a USB memory stick. The company I work for has a device that uses a chipset where the integrated flash memory only has a flash endurance of 10,000 writes. After that point, how the memory will behave is unpredictable.

100 seems ridiculously low though.

 

I'm pretty sure Jeff (MM) has flashed his car over 100 times. Or at least close to it.

I also thought about this, if the memory will start to fail or go bad after so many flashes, but I agree 100 times seems pretty low. I was thinking it would more like 1,000 times or 2,000 times, which I doubt anyone would ever flash their car that many times.

Also think about how long the Cobb AP has been out for Subaru owners. I bet you money there are some STi's out there that have flashed their PCMs well over 100 times in the years the AP has been available to them. And before anyone wants to say apples-to-oranges, the Subaru PCM is pretty damn similar (operation wise and hardware wise) to the RX-8's PCM.

 

100 is the minimal spec

 

only 95 flashes left.

 

ZOMGWTF!!! i can only flash ONE HUNDRED TIMES!?!?! whatever will i do, it'll take me(aka MM) 43 tries to get it tuned the first time, and then im sure i'll make at least 50 future changes in fueling and/or airflow.... that'll put me close to 100!!!

 

your are doommmmmmeeeedd. doomed!

beers

 

All I know is that if you have the AP and remove the flash to go to the dealer that it will not show up. It will look like a battery disconnect.
Nothing to worry about with the AP. I've had Mazda engineers plug in and data log off the OBD and not have any issue's.

 

If you are self-tuning and go through a couple different setups over say 2 years or so, I can see you hitting 100 flashes.

 

i agree. but i dont think there are many out there right now who will be jumping into that just yet. many who may WANT to, but there is quite a learning curve from piggybag management everyone has used to the way the OE PCM is setup... it'll take time.

and alos, as much as i desire to one day do my own tuning, i dont think i would ever be doing that if i'd go through a hundred flashes in a couple years.... thats reflashing every week for 2 years? i'd have to be MUCH better than that(as far as hitting the targeted results) to be comfortable tuning my own

 

I’ve not seen the MMP software do any kind of number of programming sessions type read from the PCM. That does not mean that they do not do it, it just means that I’ve look at the communication in detail and I’ve not seen it.

I've lost one PCM as well but it was my bench mule (which got pounded on a lot). It might be kinda interesting to read the EEProm then flash a few times followed by another EEProm read. The real bitch of it is having to pull the EEProm off each time to read it.

It's also worth noting that PCMs from the junk yard are not too costly and the cost of a one day PATs subscription from Mazda is not too bad either. In a worst case, you can always pop in another PCM. Also, when they fail, they refuse to erase which just means your stuck with your last tune.

Perhaps someone should ask Cobb if they have found the counter routine in the firmware and jumped around it. They are smart guys. They probably have.

One last point of interest (at least for me) – Mercedes stores their calibration tables in off board flash where they also write their adaptive values EVERY TIME YOU TURN OFF THE KEY. Talk about endurance…..

 

I've reflashed a Honda ECU (Hondata s300 on a custom turbo setup) 30 times in one tuning session. The car had injectors almost twice the size of the stock ones. Sometimes you've gotta fiddle with the lambda tables a bunch to get trims in line, and then you do multiple pulls trying different timing numbers to see if it affects spool, then you fiddle with idle settings...