
Ask HN: Control units for automotive - selmat
Has anyone experiences with programming or hacking control units for automotive?<p>Since it is proprietary software do you have any good resources how to get this kind of knowledge (besides to be car-mechanic and access to expensive software and manuals)?<p>Story behind: I know a few stories where guys with luxury cars had an issues with electronics and payed a insane money for troubleshooting in service station. Unfortunately they weren&#x27;t able to solve it quickly and within reasonable budget. They just simply order new unit and replace it.<p>On the other hand, there is small group of guys who specialize on control units. They are &quot;cheaper&quot; then authorized car-stations but still have great income and work for next 6 months. What is untold...i am not sure from where they have got required knowledge and information.
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davismwfl
So in general ECU's are not easy to just wholesale replace as they may have
safeguards built into other electronics looking for proprietary signals from
the ECU to activate. You can reprogram aspects of an ECU pretty easily, and
you can even clone an ECU. But as far as just replacing it with a non-OEM ECU,
I would think it would be cost prohibitive to do the research and development
needed to do it properly. This is especially true of higher end cars, where
the ABS computer, Radio, Transmission Controller etc all are usually separate
and require signals from the ECU. You could reverse engineer it again, but
time isn't free.

There are specs you can find on ECU's, most are SAE specs, and most late model
ECU's use CAN bus for communication. Sparkfun has an article that talks about
reading diagnostic codes etc and shows a list of most specs, although I don't
think it is comprehensive. [https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/getting-
started-with-ob...](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-
obd-ii)

Aftermarket companies that sell "chip" tuners, from what I understand, work by
first using the known protocols to gain access and tune what is possible, but
then also will either pay the OEM for access to make other modifications (and
thereby usually be covered under factory warranty), or they will reverse
engineer things like the fuel map so they can modify it, which works but isn't
so warranty friendly.

