mx5cartalk.com

Hey all,

I was getting bored, and rather buy a new car to have it waste away in my garage (only drove a measly 2500kms in the last 2 years - 1st time I had to replace the engine oil due to age rather than mileage), I'd rather just throw money modding the NC and perhaps learn a little whilst I'm at it.

Whilst looking into the Open Flash Tablets, and potentially dealing with slow support to get the Calibration ID sorted out, I noticed ECUtek have their own product & licensing freebie for the NCs (and 86s): https://www.ecutek.com/proecu-mx-5/

Anyone have any first hand experience with it? Costs an extra 155 flash points from a master tuner to get licensed for it on top of the kit price.

Apparently these RaceROM features are included in the 'free' section, which don't seem all that appealing as an mx5 NC owner :

Launch Control
Flat Foot Shifting
Downshift Auto Blip
Per Gear Rev Limits

Wholy moly - I just discovered 'romdrop' and the 4-year effort a 'speeps' did reverse engineering all the tables from the NC ECUs. This would certainly be the most cheapest option available - a Tactrix 2.0 reader is required (~$170 USD), but there are cheapo Chinese Clones of them too if you're game .

A summary of the end result: https://www.miataturbo.net/ecuflash-93/nc-specific-ecuflash-development-96471/
The original 160 page thread that started it all: https://forum.miata.net/vb/showthread.php?t=630805
The romdrop github repo: https://github.com/speepsio/romdrop

Being a Software Engineer - it's bloody impressive what 'speeps' and the contributors have been able to achieve
(I can even see my cars Calibration ID showing up in their patches folder, so I would be able to muck around in ROMRaider or ECU Flash once I get the Tactrix reader).

It's missing the cool Ecutek RaceROM features of course, but again - they're a bit gimmicky. But it looks like the crew are starting to investigate flexi-fuel support.

Now all I need to do is slowly figure out how an engine works

Well I got a little bit impatient, and grabbed a Genuine Tactrix 2.0 reader 2nd hand from a Subaru owner. (I didn't want to support the Chinese clones which literally stole Tactrix Inc.'s work)

Plugged it in to the NC, and in 10 minutes I had the ROM dumped & patched via RomDrop so I could browse thru the tables in ECUFlash (Actually made by Tactrix)

As discussed in the forums linked above, there is an area where the throttle is capped to 50% in 2nd gear (below 5K rpm) in the DBW throttle mapping - I'll be looking to change that once I've collected enough logs for the stock maps . Will probably take a few weeks to digest all the discussion topics on all the tables (but at least throttle mapping isn't going anywhere near the engine)

Attached a .jpg cos I'm too lazy to host it. APP = Accelerator Pedal Position

Great to see the NC ECU has been added to the NA & NB ECUs - manga_blue & I palyed around with this on our NA8s a few years ago when the Miata.net Socketing ECU thread was in full swing: https://forum.miata.net/vb/showthread.p ... 62&page=33

Agreed, great to see. The NC is finally getting attention from modders after being the unloved child for so long. It's a platform with great potential.

I'm actually still reading through the original thread for the RomDrop devs -> I'm a 1/3 of the way in (at about page 59 of 159), but for those who are interested in 2.5L NC conversions, speeps and fellow 2.5L modders have seemed to have made a 'patch' on the stock OEM that will support 2.5L conversions a bit more easily.
I don't fully understand the approach, but I think they cloned a set of tables related to air-flow, and redirected some of the ECU calcs to the cloned tables (and left some of the other calculations on the old 2.0L values). The cloned tables could be scaled based on increased cylinder volume.

The idea seems to have worked - At page 59-ish there seems to be a few people with running 2.5L engine with the 'single-click' patch, which I thought was damn impressive. The tools have progressed since then, so you need to read all 159 pages to know where the tool is at .

In fact - I think I see flat foot shifting and launch control parameters I can enable