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Originally Posted by Boss330
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Hello,
Figured I'd chime in since I'm being mentioned by name in here.
Thanks for searching and finding those posts that was interesting to read how I got started in tuning again. For the record, I was an enthusiast who was jerked around by tuners like most people, couldn't sort the BS from the real deal and after that post you quoted where I was left high and dry by powerchip not being able to get smogged I started learning how to tune myself. I did work for powerchip and tried very hard to improve their sales and support as well as their tuning. Powerchip's owner had a famous melt down but also the ex employees were doing a lot to try and destroy powerchip long before wayne destroyed it himself and it no longer made sense for me to try to save a sinking ship so I left. The last two months of my employment we were only selling E39 M5 tunes because of my personal reputation on the board everyone else had stopped calling.
I have been tuning as a career since then for many companies but after powerchip, I felt it better for me to do primarily wholesale tunes in the form of private/white labeling. I also worked for a well known Mercedes tuner here in SoCal and then BBI Autosport before starting my own company. I know how to tune lots of cars not just BMW, not just Mercedes and not just Porsche, so it's nice to be able to provide solutions for everyone for a change as well as apply knowledge from one marque to the next. Sometimes this industry is very hard to tolerate as there is a lot of shady people wheeling and dealing here and it is very stressful (this is why I have so much gray hair...or at least that's my excuse for it) so I preferred to stay out of the spotlight.
Back on the subject of tuning, the new Mercedes CLA45 AMG that we cracked has the same type of tuner protection as the F series bmw's so after we finished tuning the new AMG we decided to revisit the BMW world. We will probably rejoin the forums in 2015 now that we have something new to provide the community. I was kicked off M5board because I was not a sponsor but there was constant posts about my products, as such other vendors complained and got me banned. I still sell a lot of E39 M5 tunes so it didn't make sense to sponsor the forum for one product and the way the forum mods and owners treated me also made me not want to give them any money. Water under the bridge
I apologize for not setting a consumer website up earlier but for my wholesale accounts I had no need for a website as my dealers contact me directly and I spend most of my time on product development not web development.
As far as tuning the F series cars, there is a lot of healthy skepticism out there, but yes it is possible to flash a custom tune in an F10 M5, F8x M4, etc. The tuning protection for these ECU's is extremely hard to get by and requires a bit more work than just having a bench flashing device. As stated by someone else, opening the ECU's to flash them is par for the course now as Bosch and Siemens have been locking out the ability to read via OBD2 for quite a while now. The AMG's MED17 needs to be opened and there is no reason to be scared as long as your tuner knows what they're doing. I personally don't drill the ECU's but some tuners do either to save time or because they have a problem with breaking the boards when opening them. I will tell you however that the twin ECU's in the F10 M5 are the absolute hardest to open out of any ECU I've ever seen in my life. Luckily I've been opening ECU's since I started and it's nothing new to me. There will eventually be a way to flash them without removing the ECU's but that will take some time, look how long it took to get bench flashing going! It is the normal life cycle of a new generation of ECU's, when the E39 M5 first came out you had to pull the chips off and reflash them manually too and it wasn't until they were almost out of production that there was a very easy and widely available way to flash them OBD2. There was also a lot of false starts for flashing the F series cars but that's because someone shady was selling every tuner including me a method of flashing BMW signed files like the press file and anniversary file which would be loaded via ESYS OBD2. There is also a way to flash in an editable file OBD2 but there is problems with this method as well and of course the people that have access to such files want an arm and a leg for it.
I've attached a screen shot of a hexdump for an M4 we have been playing with. It shows one of the VMAX maps and the area which contains the rev limit or NMAX. You apply a conversion factor of .25 to the values of 32000 to get the rev limit of 8000RPM. There is obviously different rev limits for different conditions including limp modes which is why there are so many here. I apologize for not taking the time to identify the maps individually in winols I just had no intention of changing the rev limit so it would be a waste of my time. I'd also love to show you the fun parts but I don't want to give away 2 years of blood sweat and tears to get to this point. I also attached the M4 hexdump and not the M5 because there has been a stock F10 M5 file floating around for a while now that anyone can get ahold of, the M4 is harder to come by.
Anyways thanks for letting me chime in guys, it's an exciting time for the community again now that there is a way to get rid of those pesky warning lights on the dash and maximize the potential of these machines. The AMG guys have been going largely uncontested for a while now, will be interesting to see a fully done up 63 AMG vs f10 M5 here in U.S. soil