Hello all,

Just thought I'd share a story from the last couple weeks. About a week and a half ago, I decide to go in and edit my fan temps using my Diablosport (Granatelli badged) Predator.

My car is a 2000. I'd just put in a new Diehard this spring and my charging system is money. Previous to this I'd loaded the base tune over the winter and had no issues.

I pop the Predator in and tinker around, get the fans where I want it, and go to load the file. File hits 3% and bam, locks. Uh oh. Everything was off. No stereo, no interior lights, nothing. Even unplugged my amp. From this point forward the Predator won't recognize the ECM, and my car is DEAD.

Well it ends up as many of you know (I didn't) that my ECM was now hosed. Akin to a BIOS write failure on a PC mainboard, I was stuck.

Diablosport was great to work with. I shipped them the ECM and Tuner, and they shipped back my ECM in stock condition, with a new, up to date Predator.

But the fact of the matter is - my car was dead for about a week, and it cost $45 to ship that high of an insured value through UPS.

I guess I just wanted to share. Don't go messing with a programmer unless you can deal with not having your car for a few days. I could see someone getting stuck really hard by this type of situation.

I don't know how common it is but I'm thinking about picking up a junkyard ECM just to have a backup runner.

FYI the new 1798 tuner they sent me has significantly more features in it than my older Granatelli one did. So if you're thinking of going used on one of these, do some homework and try to get the 1798 PN.

 

Second thing I got, when I started messing with tuning,
was a spare PCM flashed to my VIN. This works OK with
Predators though not some other packages.

Any bus traffic (like turning on a light, opening a door,
rolling down a window) can upset the write process.
And the Predator has a dismal slow write for you to sit
still through.

 

That's actually another thing I noticed, this new Predator writes the file probably 5x faster than the first one did.

I bet the first one took about 2-3 minutes, this one is maybe 30 seconds. Tech support dude said they did this to improve reliability. Something about the first 3-4% being critical. In the off chance you get a failure that early - that's when you're stuck.

 

Did you have any conversation about anyone being able to send in their old one for the update free/or even for a charge? Just wondering, I have one of the first units they came out with.

 

I thought if the programming locked up, leaving you with a dead car, you can call Diablosport or Predator and have them give you a password to do a forced reflash of the stock program without sending anything back to them. Maybe it depends on the model year of the car, or the version of the Predator.

 

2001 - I don't know. If you have one that isn't the U1798 part number, it seems to me they would offer you something. Doesn't seem right that something should have to break before they update you. At worst case I think it'd be a $99 flash charge, but they'd probably help you out. Call them. My original unit was Granattlli serial number lower than 300 - I think it was REEALLLY old. I noticed many of the "box tune" settings were quite different in the new tuner, and there were quite a few more options, including downshift speeds and a lot of sensor disable options which I was very happy to see added.

Minion - yes, that is true unless appearently if the write process fails very early or in a particular way like mine did. So long as you can link with the ECM, you can force your factory tune back in. But mine failed very early in the write process, and this totally locked the ECM. The predator wouldn't even see it. According to Diablo if this happens the only option is to buy a new ECM or send it to them to fix it. Appearently even a dealer or service center couldn't re-write it because it won't even start the communication process. I'm not sure what they do.

Essentially I think it is like writing a computer BIOS or formatting a PC hard drive. If the write fails really early - then it's kinda like the PCM formatting is corrupt so you're stuck. If it gets past the formatting and starts writing the file - then you can go in and replace the file, still.

 

Thanks - got mine from RWTD in early '03. It's a U7198 and is old...even has 9 pins on the connector instead of 3 like the newer ones. I'm going to post over at diablosporttuning (if I can remember my username/password) LOL and see what they say. Thanks again...