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This thread was about to turn the way we modify our cars on it's head.

Some have too much invested in how things currently are to allow that to happen, while those that are investing in the future don't want us to know the ins and outs.

It's the race team mentality of tuners which strangles this community.

I, for one, am tired of this shit.
 
This thread was about to turn the way we modify our cars on it's head.

Some have too much invested in how things currently are to allow that to happen, while those that are investing in the future don't want us to know the ins and outs.

It's the race team mentality of tuners which strangles this community.

I, for one, am tired of this shit.
it's simple to fix then...............

dump as much money as I have and Lohen has then give it away for free...............I will count the hrs you stay in business...............
 
it's simple to fix then...............

dump as much money as I have and Lohen has then give it away for free...............I will count the hrs you stay in business...............
The majority of people that can't get a straight answer won't spend their money - it's the businesses that are suffering through lack of transparency.

Things can be kept as secret squirrel as you like, I could spend £25k with you over the next 4 weeks Jan, get remote tuned, have 400bhp.

Then I could (I wouldn't) take it to Lohen the day after it's finished, leave it for a week and say there you go, there's all of RMW's secret ingredients, copy what you want.

(just using RMW and Lohen as examples)
 
The majority of people that can't get a straight answer won't spend their money - it's the businesses that are suffering through lack of transparency.

Things can be kept as secret squirrel as you like, I could spend £25k with you over the next 4 weeks Jan, get remote tuned, have 400bhp.

Then I could (I wouldn't) take it to Lohen the day after it's finished, leave it for a week and say there you go, there's all of RMW's secret ingredients, copy what you want.

(just using RMW and Lohen as examples)
First off there are very few people out here in the Mini world capable of coming up with that kind of money, then trying to copy it...........add that again, then worry about the lawsuit coming on top of that
You are dreaming if you think someone who has spent the time and money testing this like I have to give it away. Most people capable of doing this have too big of ego's to try to copy it anyways............wink*

we have all seen the disasters of the people who thought they knew better
 
I feel its fair to point out a few things before the lynch mobs come out of the klan meetings.

Jan has posted a lot more data about all of his projects esp his RnD phases than Ive seen tuners in other communities post, ditto for 1320 on their turbo development, sure theres a lot going on elsewhere but I think people on here a little selfish at times as its a case of please sir i want some more. On things like the Vipec Jan has been very open and its probably why he sold about 30 in the space of a weekend. Hes also been very open with the development of the Rotex and TVS, if that were other car communities i expect all you see is a post in an online shop with a price.
 
I cant see what could be given away on a 12 year old ECU. The processor info listed is on a public site?!. Sounds like a load misguided fear and old politics, if he laid out every detail on here do you think it would change anything? other than market share for Lohen and expose resellers..

Give it away for free...sheeeeeeeit > knowledge is one thing that's everywhere for free (if you look for it), skill however is another ball game engineering is not IT.

a word to learn "cartel"

Fin.
 
I've seen this situation happen on 3 platforms, VW, Audi and now Mini. VW Vortex, Audizine and now MT.

Basically with closed ECUs its a fine balance for vendors to provide information about "how it works" without giving too much of their own intellectual capital away for free. I can understand that as they have a business to run.
Equally as a semi-capable amateur (background as engineer and a reasonable amount of IT experience) I find the kind of insight that was shared on this thread both very interesting and potentially useful as I progress my own car.

the ECU may be 12 years old (it is of course older than that) but unlike the Subaru/Honda world where the ECU is essentially open source, to actually reverse engineer the Siemens unit in the R53 takes time and investment.
Mini modding is always going to be a niche market and as a result the few people that have made that investment are unlikely to give it away for free as Jan points out.
 
well having just read everything from jan, 1320, lohen, et-el

i have just plugged my laptop into the car and realised i know the square root of fuck-all, ::getcoat::

who's kidding who here :confused1:

anybody who has the skill set already to put all this inside info/insight to any good use
would hardly be doing cartwheels and giving up his day job on what has been divulged so far :tongue_smilie:


apologies up-front, if i am barking up the wrong tree here, and happy to eat humble lohen pie,
but the guys from Staffordshire not that long ago had a poor rep for MCS R53 tuning
based partly on big show's reports with the bluefin superchips plug and play, map of "lean doom" which they happily still sold on the web-shop for many years after 2008

rightly or wrongly
this and other input from lee has done far more good for lohen on this forum than any number of glossy adverts in the mini-rag, or the occaisional post from the rest of the team at HQ
 
As a new mini owner and new member of this well established forum I was genuinely pleased to see articulate, well informed, sound technical discussion and information exchanged. I totally understand that a business that has invested time and money into research and development would clampdown on its newly acquired information becoming public.

It is a shame that the prime source for this topic has come to an end but I for one am not surprised if the source was involved in R&D for a tuning company.

On a side topic and in answer to a previous post on here about tuning companies copying each others work, it does happen and I have experienced it happening in as little as a week. My own work has been copied and rebadged, this was obvious as certain "watermarks" were employed into the code. As with every business people are out to make money, although some companies have a somewhat different set of morales to others.

I know very little of the tuning businesses in Mini circles so please do not read between any lines of this post, I am an ex employee for a tuning company that I left over a decade ago.

I only hope that informed discussion over technical matters can continue under another thread and I look forward to participating in it.
 
i have just plugged my laptop into the car and realised i know the square root of fuck-all, ::getcoat::

who's kidding who here :confused1:
for anyone that is planning to hook up their laptop, grab the R53 ROM and try make some changes, please be aware that you need to recalcualte the checksum for the ECU prior to writing back, or you could screw things up. best case your car won't start until you flash back your original ROM image, or worst case you brick your ECU. although i've not heard of anyone actually bricking their ECU.

this is a quote from TunerPro Checksum Plugins - MTX Electronics

What are checksums? A checksum is a value that is calculated from a block of digital data with the scope of being used in the future to verify if this data has been modified in any way. So basically if you change any of the maps in your cars ECU the currently saved checksum/s will not be correct and your car in most cases will not start.
this along with hardware and software versions, as well as VIN numbers coded into the ECU ROM also means you can not just get a JCW or GP tune and flash it to your MCS.

so unless you have a system to calculate the checksum, or you have someone that can do it for you, even if you do figure out where the maps are and what the maps do and how to change them, you will be stuck. really, this is where the vendors have you. they know how to calc the checksum and you don't. or you know what, maybe they don't know how to do it either and they paid another company for the software to calculate the checksum data for them.

now don't get me wrong, i'm not trying to come across saying "don't do it", if you have the know how and the balls to do it, i highly recommend it. i've been looking at the mini ecu on and off in my spare time for about 6-8 months now and have seen good results.

finding the maps in amongst all the gibberish comes with experience. i've been tuning non-minis for about 12yrs now, and originally i started with pre-existing information on map locations. over time i learnt how to recognise the patterns of maps amongst hex and 2D map representation. the problem i have is that the ECUs i used to (and still do) tune are quite a bit simpler than the mini ecu.

i've not actually seen two mini ECUs that are the same. the map locations are different for each software revision, i've only seen about 4 MCS ROMS, 2 JCW and 1 GP ROM in the time i've been looking at everything, but because each was a different software version, not one was the same. at first this absolutely did my head in. some guy from spain gave me the map locations for stuff he had found on his ecu, and none of it matched on mine, then i looked at a JCW ROM, same thing. i was going to give up, didn't look at it for about a week, then it dawned on me, the ROMs must be different on purpose.

for someone new to it all, to further complicate things, some of the maps are 8bit, some of the maps are 16bit, so you basically have to scan through the ROM twice, although again there is software that will do this for you, but it's not overly accurate most of the time, you might find a few legit maps this way though.
 
Dead thread is dead, but I thought i'd contribute anyway for those still following.

Coming from the VAG community tuning forums (nefmoto), I found this being passed around. Lots of good info but I don't know how concise it is as I haven't poured over the entire document yet because I currently don't own a mini.
In the market though. View attachment SIEMANS EMS2000 - ENGINE MANAGEMENT OVERVIEW.pdf

Edit: this seems that it may be the same document in the original post, so, just re-upping for those finding a dead link.
 
To be honest, I think this post really needs to keep progressing. We're talking about a platform that's 10+ years old now, and really hasn't made any strides for the diy'er out there (like myself). I was really hoping this thread would open up some doors and provide answers that I've been scouring the internet for months looking for, and just when I thought it would, it was shot down. I love my R53, but during the course of gathering parts for my turbo conversion in the US where we don't really have the amount of knowledge available that you guys do, I've been more than tempted to just sell the car altogether simply because no one has any answers as to what the stock ecu can or can't do. I realize a stand alone is the easiest way to go about things, but I'd much rather keep the factory unit if at all possible. Heck, I'm not even opposed to springing for a FA53 unit since all the hard work is done finding the appropriate tables, but when the only reply I ever get for my conversion is "don't bother, get a stand alone", it makes me realize just how closed minded some groups can really be. Pretty sure that's the whole reason Jay released FA53, to give the diy base a powerful tool to work with and help grow the grass roots knowledge base, but really it's been the exact opposite.
 
I wouldn't care what it is as long as I can tune my turbo R53 with it lol. Heck, I'm almost to the point of running a SAFC at this point just to get the car running and probably swap over to a stand alone down the road.
 
Check out the Unichip Q+ as an alternative
So it's pretty much a SAFC on steroids from what I can tell. I'm not opposed to it as long as I can control timing as well, unlike the SAFC which tends to add timing when clamping down the MAP signal. Question is, how badly will the factory ecu react when trying to increase injector sizes? I'm currently running a JCW map with 380cc injectors, so even going to 440's is only about 15% larger, but I'm wondering how the factory ecu might try to over compensate when the LTFT and STFT numbers start coming into play. For whatever reason Mini owners in the states seem to think the factory ecu will relearn everything and compensate any changes out. Not sure how I feel about this notion since I've never personally seen it.
 
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