More than a year has passed again, and I'm happy to anounce the availability of the next release, EcmSpy for Mono version 1.1, who is made available now. Several new features have been added, namely better means to diagnose O2 sensor and fuelling errors, also making adjestments better and easier. The contributions towards Papworth Hospital are very pleasant too. Thanks to the many generous users, who decided to activate their copy, more than 5000 £ (6000 &euro, 7700 US-$) were raised. Many German users decided to donate to Stiftung Bärenherz (a hospice for deadly ill children), which received over 2000 &euro (1700 £, 2600 US-$).
Sincere thanks are given to all who contributed to this exciting results.
Thanks to EcmSpy users, who decided to activate their demo copy and donate to the Papworth Hospital, the total amount of donations done through the UKBEG fundraising activities passed the 15,000 £ (24,000 US-$) barrier. In less than 3 month more than 800 £ (1250 US-$) had been raised by EcmSpy license fees.
This achievement is very exciting and I want to thank all donors for their contribution!
Due to high demands, to have a tool available for DDFI-3 equiped Buells (as those with the Thunderstorm and Helicon engines) as well, I decided to extend the capabilites of the previous version and also start a new code branch, done by rewriting the application. The last year was therefore not only affected by the relaunch of this site, but also and primarily by working with the most recent ECM types to get the necessary informations, as required for the all new EcmSpy for Mono software.
I'm also pleased to announce that this project led to efforts from other developers and enthusiasts - one of the key intentions when setting up all of this. Mark Mansur's TunerPro application is now capable of reading and showing live data directly read from the ECM, and more exciting features will follow in future.
As already done in the previous years, I want to express my appreciation and gratitude to all supporters of the EcmSpy project.
After almost four years of development the developers decided to shut down the ECMSpy project. Various reasons led to this decision, including the increasing drain on the developers' time. Exploring the ECM and learning how it works has been lots of fun, very informative and allowed us to better understand how it works and where some of the commonly known flaws lie.
It's my heart's desire to thank all contributors, translators, information-diggers for their much appreciated help. Without your support this project would not have been possible.
The idea for this project has been developing for some time. I was alerted through a posting in the german XBORG forum, where a freely programmable ECU for the Buell was announced. Naturally this turned out to be some expensive software to modify the Buell ECM, which had to be purchased.
At the beginning of the same year I had bought my Buell and wondered whether it would be possible to establish communication to the Buell's ECM without using expensive tools. At that time it was my goal to get as much information out of the ECM, to sufficiently supply a MegaSquirt ECU with all the data required to gain control over the fuel injection system and swap the Buell's ECM with a MegaSquirt ECU.
Unfortunately this approach failed because of the simple fact that the MegaSquirt-II's firmware did not fully support V-type engines at that time. So I began thinking about programming my own firmware, not for the original MegaSquirt but for a descendant of it, the MegaSquirt AVR. I had worked with AVR microcontrollers before and started to write the first parts of my own software.
All the maps and lists needed were unknown, so I had to find a way to get this data. Therefore I designed a "Buell simulator", which copied the most important signals of a Buell well enough that the original ECM could be attached to it and did not react with an error. Naturally no driving conditions could be simulated, but it was sufficient to monitor the injector pulses and measure them in relation to the engine's revolutions and throttle position.
Then the idea came to me, why not use my measuring equipment to find out how to directly communicate with the ECM, as some other software did so too. To my excitement it turned out that a simple serial connection was used to exchange data between a PC and the ECM. At the next step I started to decode the contents of data sent from the ECM. Now the two years experience I have with fuel injection controllers and the software used in them paid off, because within a few weeks more than half of the runtime data (temperatures, number of revolutions, injection duration etc..) had been discovered.
After some time I became aware, that I would need some support because such a project would be too large to run alone, apart from the fact that I would never be able to write software for a PC. For this reason I started enquiring in the XBORG forum in order to recruit some helpers and to check the demand for such software. Since then approximately half a year passed by and the results are respectable: the EcmSpy team increased to six developers and the software both for the PC and PalmOS PDA is available for download. Some future plans include some hardware modules, which will to be used as datalogger and display.
Lots of thanks to all developers and supporters, who worked on their parts with a great amount of devotion and dedication. As always some important work takes place in the background, as some web space had to be obtained and the ecmspy.de domain had to be registered. Werner, the admin of the XBORG forum, provided us with all that and therefore I want to thank him sincerely. Lots of people unmentioned put efforts into the development and improvement of our little tool and I would like to express my gratitude. I wish and hope that all our work pays off and the EcmSpy project will be helpful for all it's users.