I’ve been dragging my feet on purchasing my Macchina unit because of a lurking question I’ve had: has anyone out there in the great wilds of the interwebs actually cracked an early OBD II Toyota ECU? I’m not the programming type, but I’m willing to put in the time and effort if there is even a remote chance of being able to modify ignition, fuel and timing maps for my harem of 2JZ Toyota engines. If anyone has any experience or thoughts on the subject, I’m all ears.
Cheers,
Chris
I am assuming prior to 2008? Currently the protocols for pre 2008 (non-canbus) vehicles are not actively working in the M2 module. You would have to start there. To go further you will likely have much more luck on one of the ECU Hack forums. There are a few out there.
I was under the impression that pre-2008 was still CANBus, but it was a proprietary Toyota/Lexus protocol. I’ve been wandering around ECU hacking, tuning and mod boards/forums and I’ve come up with no luck. It seems like something cracked the protocol in the Toyota MR2 world, but they kept their findings very secret. So the first step would simply be querying the CANBus to figure out the protocol used? Sorry, I’m fairly ignorant to this world, but I can’t even find someone that will accept my money for trying. Thanks for getting back to me, Rod(?), I appreciate it.
-Chris
All depends. Federal law mandated Canbus by 2008. GM moved some of their vehicles before then. For example, Full sided passenger trucks had their diagnostic ports switched to CANBUS in 2006 but still had the older systems in the vehicle until the new truck line came out in 2007. So the 2006 trucks I believe are a hybrid of the old J1850 and the newer canbus with CANBUS becomming the system wide norm in 2007. As I understand it other GM vehicles switched on a different time frame. Some sooner, some later but ALL vehicles had to be switched over by 2008. It is my understanding that Toyota MAY have used the same setup as GM which was the J1850 VPW protocol. This protocol is much more hacked than the canbus protocol mainly because it has been out for much longer. If you can validate that the Toyota used the GM J1850 VPW then I can expect you will find much of the same features that work on a GM to work the same in a Toyota. I believe that Toyota and GM worked together on many projects and depending on if your vehicle is one of those it may be as much a GM as a Toyota. May not be 100% the same but enough that similarities show up.
The engines I’m dealing with are '02-'05 Lexus is300 2JZ-GE’s. The protocol for the is300 up to '03 is ISO 9141, but it has a changeover and could be either 9141 or CAN up until '06. Beyond this, I’m in the dark. I guess I have a lot not studying to do before I can make any headway into this.
If you’re really wanting to learn how to do this… the first step is getting past security. Here is a paper, which is a very good read. This is for Toyota and Ford. This explains how the security works, and how they were able to get past it. As well as controlling the steering, brakes, etc… To truly understand it, you should read it from beginning to end… more than once 