Spyder ECU successfully reprogrammed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

**Jimvr4** · 09-04-2011, 07:47 PM

Background - A spyder owner sent me his Top ECU for troubleshooting and I determined the 68HC711E9 microchip was bad. The following describes the effort to communicate to and reprogram the chip using an old M68HC11 serial programmer.

SUCCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! …………………….finally!

I received the programmer from Bob on Thursday, opened it up and realized I needed to get a serial port going since Bob couldn’t spare his USB serial converter. On Friday I stopped at Frys and picked up an FTDI based USB to serial converter and I spent a couple of hours trying everything I could think of and it would not talk to the programmer. Of course I had done loopback testing, etc but nothing worked.

Saturday afternoon I got back to Frys and returned the converter and picked up an IDC10 to serial cable after learning that my motherboard had an internal serial port that just needed to be brought out. Got that one home and nothing. Opened it up and finally figured out the wiring was wrong for my motherboard. So I rewired it twice before getting it right and finally tried it with the programmer under DosBox. Still nothing – wouldn’t connect. I decided to try to build a bootable DOS CD with Prog11 on it and took forever to figure out that my SATA drive could not be recognized by DOS and I would have to embed the files into the boot image itself. Got that done and working and when I started it up I got a “runtime 200” error so I had to give up.

Finally I tried going back to my DosBox setup and this time the damn thing WORKED.

So, I popped in Jim L’s chip into the programmer and read it and dumped the .S19 file. I then put a blank chip in and programmed it with the .S19 file and installed the new chip into MY own ECU (remember my theory was the output port in Jim L’s chip had failed). The newly programmed chip on my ECU had the SAME failure symptoms that Jim L’s original chip had on his ECU. I discovered that the difference between the brand new chip and MY chip was only in the EEPROM sector, the program sectors were identical.

So, I dumped my own chip and made a new .S19 file and programmed the EEPROM portion into the test chip and Jim’s ECU worked fine with that. I thought I found the ECU serial number location in EEPROM but when I attempted to rewrite JimL’s serial number into the chip, Toplink sees it as blank. So I programmed a new chip and it WORKS on JimL’s ECU but the serial number is blank.

Then I reprogrammed the EEPROM on his BAD chip with MY EEPROM values and now his BAD chip works fine as well but has a blank serial number. So it wasn’t the bad port at all. Something in the EEPROM wasn’t right but I have no idea what. I noticed that there are two copies of EEPROM at different addresses and both copies were the same even on the bad chip. So it didn’t appear to be EEPROM corruption. So now I have two working chips for JimL.

But what I can say for certain is I can take a Spyder Top ECU chip and DUPLICATE it.

JimVR4