RX8 ECU ROM Dumper

This project is very much a work in progress. It's primarily developed by myself with occasional assistance from a small group of enthusiasts in the community. If you wish to get involved, please do so.

Disclaimer

It's not my fault if you mess your car up. Really. If you're here, I assume you at least sort of understand what you're doing. It should be noted that THERE IS ALMOST NO MORE POWER LEFT in the OEM tune for RX8 from Mazda. If you are hunting for more power out of your stock Renisis, you will not find it here. It is expected that this project is targeted at tuners for ported, boosted or otherwise modified engines.

Usage

Execute ecudump or ecudump.exe depending on your platform.

Downloading the ROM from an ECU

It should take about 2 minutes to complete. Once complete, you should have a file in the same directory as the executable labeled with your ECU's VIN and CALID.

ecudump.exe --download

Downloading a RAM snapshot from an ECU

This should only take about 5 seconds.

ecudump.exe --download=ramdump.bin --start-address=0xffff6000 --transfer-size=0x7D00

Planned Features

This project is still in it's infancy, and probably won't get a ton of love until I have more time for it. I do have some goals and non-goals in mind.

Goals

ECU flashing. currently only downloading is supported, for this to be useful it'll need to be able to flash firmware back to the ECU.
Develop/port a kernel or bootloader. I'm not currently sure if this will be required, but if so it will get done.
ROMRaider or ECUFlash integration. For flashing the ROM to be useful to anyone, the ROM will need to be mapped.

Non Goals

Make money. I started this project specifically because I disagree with the model that current companies are relying on.
Replace Ecutek, Cobb, or whatever your favorite tuning company is. They have a business, I am just bored.
Handhold or teach engine tuning. There are plenty of (better) resources for this already.
Handhold or teach reverse engineering. There are not resources for this unfortunately, and this will not be a solution to that.
New ECU features
Removing ECU features (yes, this includes the immobilizer. Just pay $100 for a new key)

With all that being said, I am doing this "for fun", on my own free time. If you feel so inclined buy me a coffee with the sponsor button above.

Getting Involved

My long term goal is to have an option for tuning RX8s without needing to pay $250+ for a license to closed source software on top of the closed source J2354 Interface. With that said, if you are also interested please let me know. There is a lot of ongoing work happening and would love some additional help. Issues, Pull Requests, and any other feedback is welcome.

Linux Support

Linux is supported experimentally, however you will have to compile it yourself. If you (the reader) are interested in this, feel free to reach out or open an issue.

# clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/ConnorRigby/rx8-ecu-dump.git -b v0.1.0
cd rx8-ecu-dump

# fetch and build external dependencies (very important)
git submodule update --init --recursive
cd lib/j2534

# this patch needs to be applied to fix a bug in the library.
git patch apply ../*.patch
cd j2534
make

# optionally install the library globally (you proably don't want/need this)
sudo make install

# build the program
cd ../../../
make

Once built, the same instructions should apply as for Windows. There is one caveat that may trick Linux users up: permissions. See the j2534 documentation.

LICENSE

Code is licensed under the APACHE-2 license where possible. other licenses may apply to individual files. Make sure to check for this if you plan on using anything found in this repo. Notably the code in the folder J2534 is Copyright (C) 2004- Tactrix Inc.

ConnorRigby / rx8-ecu-dump