User Friendly Programming Interface

[Peter Wales]

>
>dear jim  well i,m just new on the project
>and you wanted to now about some stand alone emulators well here is a device
>that can do just thatit,s called the dataman s4
>and you can test the e-proms,

The dataman is an ENGLISH product (yay)

They are available in the US from Dataman in Orlando. I have the address at
the office if you need it. We use them here and in the UK and they are
great. The price is about $600

There are problems with this type of system however. The transfer rate is
very slow so the software we use only changes one byte at a time. Initially
it takes about 1 minute to download the program into the vehicles computer.
Then byte changes are as fast as you can hit the keys.

You put the cursor on the byte to change, hit the + or - key and as you
change it it sends the new value to the car's ECU. This way you can do
programming in real time. We have parts and software which allow the new
data to be used by the engine without causing a mammouth cough as the data
is changed, and of course checksum correction is automatic. 

The problem is knowing which bytes are being accessed by the car ECU so we
feed back from the dataman the addresses which are being accessed by the ECU
and use these to generate a cursor on the screen. Then you know which part
of the map is being accessed.

It may be better to use a full emulator and a card in the PC so as to be abe
to do a full fast data dump. Again, I have details of systems at the office
but the problem here is you need an expansion docking bay for the PC and
they don't run on 12v. So you need an inverter. etc etc etc

I am glad I solved all of these problems years ago. 

Good luck Jim



Peter Wales
President Superchips Inc
Chairman Superchips Ltd        "Timing is everything"