How Express Ensures the Safety of You and Your ECU

What are the problems?

The risk is always there. It is a quite big problem you (or your colleague, employee) can damage your tuning tool and / or the connected ECU with wrong wiring. It is enough to put a +12V wire for example to the 11th pin instead of the 10th pin. If you hit a sensitive line by a mistake be sure that the ECU will be damaged. Bricked forever, on in better case can be repaired in a week.

If you put the tool’s +12V out wire to a ground line of the ECU by a mistake there is a big chance of damage your tool, or its accessories like boot-box or power-box or its power supply.

Using the conventional bench-mode programming (pin to pin wiring on bench) there are several further risk factors. You need to disassemble the car and remove the ECU. During these steps it is easy to make a mistake.

It is also easy to bend / break the ECU’s pins by using the conventional one-by-one wiring method. And wasting your time with always repeating the same long and risky process is also not the best.

Some tuning tools don’t have any protection. Neither to protect themselves nor to protect the ECU in case of wrong wiring. Some of them have basic protection like PTC fuse as a current limiter, current measurement and cut off, but it is not enough. With a wrong connection the ECU can be damaged in some milliseconds.

We wanted to invent and develop the safest bench cable. (It’s just a side effect that it ended up being the quickest and most convenient bench cable on the best pricing…)

We don’t promise a 100 percent solution either (because of there is none), but we do our best to ensure safety.

ECU connection / power test

Express has multilevel check method, and will allow power up the connected ECU by the tuning tool in only case if all tests passed. It checks / tests:

• checks that there is no unwanted voltage from the tuning tool
• DC input (undervoltage, overvoltage, voltage drop)
• current (several tests and monitoring)
• cable ID (is the good cable connected for the selected ECU?)
• does peak current pulse test on the selected +12V outputs
• does capacitor charge test to check the behavior of the ECU
• does average current test if hasn’t seen any short circuit or abnormal current pattern on the previous tests.

The testing takes around 3 second, and starts automatically in the background when you select the wiring variation for your ECU.  – at the last step of ECU selection

There are several possible outcome of the test:

• passed, all ok
• passed with warning (too high or low input voltage)
• failed – too much voltage drop, weak PWS
• failed –  critically low or high input voltage
• failed – unwanted voltage detected from the tuning tool, test aborted
• failed – no ECU found (wrong ECU selection, or not connected)
• failed – short circuit or abnormal currents on the output
• failed – other error

If the test passed, you can go and do ID. If there is a warning, better to check and fix. If there is an error, you have to fix it by checking the ECU type, PWS, connections. More details at the troubleshooting.