Opensource LS Flashing(It's Closer Than You Think)

[blundar]

PeteS, you may find this useful:
http://www.gearhead-efi.com/Fuel-Inj...0883#post70883

[PeteS]

There hasn't been much to talk about in this thread recently and I've had a lot of questions asking what the status of this project was since it just kind of seemed to fade away over the last month or so, that was the calm before the storm......

[Xnke]

Nice. Does this mean you're using your own open-source flash kernel now or are you still using the LS1Flash closed-source kernel?

[NSFW]

The kernel is closed source but we have permission to use it and I think we we will soon have permission to distribute it.

[Xnke]

How's the UI stuff going? Is the hardware abstraction layer stuff working out well? Which interfaces did you ultimately stick with so far?

[PeteS]

How's the UI stuff going? Is the hardware abstraction layer stuff working out well? Which interfaces did you ultimately stick with so far?

Working out the last of the bugs and tweaking a few things to improve read times with some of the tools. We are pretty close to being able to release a "beta" version that will work in a vehicle as well as it does on the bench.

Tools we have tested to be 100% working for read at this point....

Obdlink Sx (Usb), Lx(BT), Mx(BT) - 1x speeds with 512 byte blocks and by far the slowest but manageable on a bench.... in car you'd need a damn good battery with 1mb pcm's. $30 -$80 price range depending on device

Allpro (USB), Allpro Development board(Rx/Tx headers), Allpro "kit"(Rx/Tx headers) - 4x speeds W/2048 byte blocks. 512K pcm is around 7 minutes, 1mb is around 15 minutes but these times will get faster as we make improvements. $25-$35 price range depending on device. **The Bluetooth version is currently not working however you can add an HC-5 BT module($4.00) to either of the boards with Rx/Tx connections to make it BT**

Avt - 852 is smoking fast and will be a contender for any commercial tool. Expect $300 depending on what options you order one with. The Avt-842 "Should" also be working but we have not verified.

J 2534 - This one's interesting, the quality of the device has a HUGE impact on read times but so far every J tool genuine and clone's(quality clones) has worked with out an issue. MDI, Vxdiag Nano, Mongoose etc are all working with out issue. A quality MDI clone is comparable in time to the Avt-852 but the Avt still win's. The Vxdiag is significantly slower then the MDI and is more in line with the Allpro for speed. $90-$2500 price range

At this point every tool we set out to support is working, some are much faster then others but that was to be expected. The real deciding factor is cost of the interface but that was the intention of all of this. The end user will be able to decide how much or how little they want to spend to be able to get into programming. While the J tool is pretty expensive for a lot of them these are also very common in automotive shops where a lot of people work (or have friends that work) and would have access to them making them still accessible to a lot of people.


Things on the todo list still include cleanup and some minor bugs and a final version of the flash kernel. Antus from Pcmhancking has shard a couple different kernels we've been working with for testing but he hasn't decide what the "release" version of the kernel will be at this point. Antus has been working on extensive firmware changes to the Allpro and working directly with the company to improve and fix some bugs we had with it. Once that's wrapped up I'm sure he get the final version of the kernel worked out. There has been talk of adding compression into the kernel but we're not sure how the "Elm" stuff would like it, compression can DRASTICALLY speed up read times, for example the 1mb pcm's only take around 20 seconds longer to read then the 512Kb pcm's do. It's a huge gain but it may create more problems at this point so it's still up in the air.

Once a read only version is out and no one finds any major bugs we've missed a calibration only write will be next on the list will hopefully be working this summer, once that's done a full OS write will be the last thing that's added and will be a ways out at this point.

There are a couple of people working on Xdf's as well but coverage will be spotty on the 1mb's for a while yet. There are a LOT of os's and each one takes a good bit of time to create. I'm in talks with a couple of people that have partial Xdf's on the 512k pcm's......if they were to "donate" them to the cause and they were finished it would give almost complete coverage for the 411 and 0896 pcm's.

[Xnke]

Right now there are some pretty complete XDF's for the 512K PCMs, as you really only want to use the 2002 unified OS for most swaps. The unified OS lets you easily swap blocks to get the engine/transmission combination right, and has the widest coverage of features out of all of the other OS's.

As to the 1mb PCMs, we haven't had a free/inexpensive way to read/write them that didn't already have the ability to edit the PCM, so not too many people have messed around with them yet. Once your tool is released, I don't expect it will take very long to get a WIDE variety of XDF/ADX contributions. I believe we already have a few people working on the blue/clear PCM as well, I've done some work with it and EJ282 has done some. Those applications will likely be slower to come to fruition, but as the hardware is very similar, it won't take too long to get them all going, I think.