Bommello

Alright for a couple months now 01Steve and I have been trying to figure out how we would get the Beta 2 ECU to work on our cars. As you know these are tunable ECUs. We have a couple ideas but nothing solid so far. We only really know of one person that has done the swap and that is Mad John. So since seeing him back reminded me of his swap I hope he will chime in and give us some info about the swap. If anybody else, has any ideas chime in as well.

REDZMAN

I'm pretty sure the only way to do it is to swap out the entire harness, as the wiring isn't the same, the amount of wires aren't the same, and the sensors/connectors aren't the same. Otherwise you would have to make a pnp style adapter harness, and run extra wires to make up for the ones missing, then swap connectors where needed, adding in the extra wires.

Then hope it works.

That's a LOT of work, and a lot of splicing/soldering.

In the end, WHY? Yeah, the Beta 2 may be tuneable, but at what cost? Isn't it like $400 to get it tuned? Then you are set with that tune till you can afford to get it tuned again, right?

I looked at these options for years, and that's why I went with my PnP MS setup. Not one wire cut, and everything WORKS. All that, and I can tune it myself, for free.

SOCKS_old

you would be better off just getting a standalone system or a piggyback.. and the only real point would be if you are going FI or an extensive N/A build. will be quite the headache to swap the entire harness. more PITA than wiring or plugging in a standalone system.

and buying a used harness could also be risky. you could wire it all up and then the harness could be damaged where you couldn't see it, and have to start over.

i would never bother with such an endeavor just to have a tunable ECU when there are at least a few other options out there that would be easier and not cost a ton.

heck, you could get a used SAFC/MSD combo and do some wiring so you wouldn't have to reset the ECU all the time and be able to do pretty much anything you needed for N/A.

01steve

yes as alex said, i've been pondering how to go about swapping a gk ecu into a rd-...

i understand the sensors and harness are different but my time is not that valuable so i can spend a couple of hours fishing the harness, sensors, ecu out of a junkyard.

as nice as the megasquirt sounds i personally would rather not opt for it. it is very cost effective and very enticing but i don't like the idea of running a piggy-back or stand alone when i can run an oem ecu that can obide w/ emissions laws and is fully tunable not to mention oem reliability.

with that being said, a few concerns of mine would be: getting the a/c to run w/ the siemens ecu and the obd-ii working properly.

i feel that these issues can be fixed easily by someone w/ more experiece and knowledge w/ these ecu's (cough mad_john).

i know the gk crowd are in the process of getting the software and hardware to tune thier ecu's (sam2000 i believe) through sources other than t.c. over at NGM. from what i understand this will provide the customer the ability to tune the oem ecu themselves (or professionally). that alone kinda convinced me to lean toward the siemens ecu over our current 8-bit bosch unit.

mad_john i know you worked w/ airbourne on something very similar to this are you able to share any input on how to convert the 8-bit bosch to the 16-bit siemens?

REDZMAN

A couple of hours? My man, you are talking about dozens of hours, at the very least.

Hell, go to Newbtiburon.com and see the GK folks, with GK ECU's, that have been tuned, and see all of the problems THEY are having.

Passing emissions is simple, swap back for a day, and go do emissions. Most of these swaps will NOT be emissions friendly anyways, as newer ECU's havre VIN encoding, which comes up when they scan your ECU at the emissions point. They see you have an ecu that doesn't match your vin, or even your model/year of car?

Bhurlin can pipe in here too, as he's got a sam2000 unit. It's not as easy as you think, and we are FAR from the first folks to discuss it.

If you go for it, I wish you luck, but get any estimates for time and money and multiply them by 10 to get an actual idea of what you are facing.

01steve

emission checks are not a major concern of mine as i do live in fl where we don't have inspections-... but i would like to try to stay w/in limits.

i haven't heard any negative info on the manual trans beta2 ecu's-... maybe the bcm but not the ecu. i will however look into it.

i know that a few have had problems w/ the korean tuned ecu (shark racing, sfr, etc) in a us-spec car, but i'm looking to swap a us-spec siemens ecu into an rd and then have the tuning done.

SOCKS_old

to each is own i guess..

radu is passing his obd II inspection/emissions and hes boosted while using an FIC.

tibchic said her car drives perfect with FIC and turbo.

i see no positive point to spend all that money and time to swap to another oem ECU.

what do you need crazy tuning for anyway? like what are you thinking you are going to gain by having a tunable OEM ECU over using something like an FIC?

optimoprime

you would be 1000x better off just spending a few hundred on a piggyback. because in all reality you need to do alot of work; by the time you fish out the entire harness from the yard, pay for all the parts you need, pull the engine and swap the manifold, swap the sensors. fish out your RDharness out your car, rewire the whole car, put your engine back in, get it filled up and running. you should have just bought a piggy back.

especially because the only reason for doing the swap is to tune the car. OHH dont forget you have to pay for the tune on the GK ecu, unless you have some way to do it yourself.


just trying to make sure you know how much work your really talking about.

01steve

why would i have to pull the engine optimo? or swap the manifold-... it takes 3 holes to put in a map sensor.

it's not like swapping the sensors is going to be hard either.

the time consuming part of the swap would be pulling the harness out and getting all of the creature comforts to work w/ the new ecu.

i'm not really "gaining" anything by going this route but w/ the 16-bit ecu people could have both N/A and F/I tunability. otherwise for the N/A crowd we've got SAFC @ 85% throttle, or the megasquirt. the F/I crowd seems to be leaning toward the FIC. i think we could figure out a way to get the siemens ecu to work to our advantage wether we are N/A or F/I.

it's not like it hasn't been done before. airbourne and tibminn got it to work.

my question isn't is this worth it-... it's how can i get this to work?

SOCKS_old

buy a GK lol or swap in a beta II also, that would work.