I tried a search and it told me what I thought. Do you need to do something special to erase EEPROMs? I am using the PP2 and I thought that it automatically erased the chips before programming. I am using the AT27C256 chips as suggested on this board.

Thanks in advance.

 

Generate a bin file of all FF's and then *burn* that.
PP just burns over whatever WAS there.
Sometimes thou if a chip acts up, burning it with an FF bin clears it.

 

I am sorry but I do not know what that means. What are FFs and how do I generate a bin file for that? Thanks in advance.

 

FF is a hex representation of a number. 0xFF or 0FFh are other representations, and it means 255 and basically all bits are set to 1. Burning a bin with 0xFF means that you fill 32768 bytes with 0xFF in PP2 and write that out to the chip. I believe PP2 has that option, load a .bin and fill with 0xFF if you don't want to set the sizes and such.

 

Again I ask, what does that mean? Where do I do this? Do I do this in the PP2 or in my TC program? I am not very savvy on this computer language yet, but I am trying to learn all I can. Thanks in advance.

 

You do it in PP2.

On the left hand side of the PP2 program, you will see 2 buttons surrounded in yellow. The second button in that group says "Fill Buffer". Click that, then it will pop up 4 choices "Fill Buffer with 00, Fill Buffer With FF, Fill Buffer with XX, Cancel". Select the second one, then burn your chip. That will set your chip to be invalid, then you can load a proper .bin file and burn that.

Just so you know, regarding your original question, how to erase EEPROMs. You don't have to worry about it. When you program your .bin in PP2 it handles it for you. You do not have to do this 0xFF thing. Erasing is automatic. You only need to erase (via a UV eraser) when using an EPROM, which you do not appear to have.

 

Thank you for explaining that to me in detail.

I was under the impression that the EEPROMs required no special erasing process, kinda why I chose them!

However, last night I was having a problem, I tried to change the fuel values at WOT only and it took me quite a while to get a chip to burn correctly. Each time I would install the new chip and the car would barely run and CHECK ENGINE light would come right on. Very strange. I tried all of my 4 chips that are not in current use, all to the same result. I checked carefully to make sure I had intalled them into the programmer correctly. I check to make sure they were in the computer correctl. I re installed my chip I have been using a few weeks now and it worked fine. After a search last night, I tried again to burn a chip. This time I did nothing different form the previous times except this time I guess it worked because the car ran fine.

This made me think that maybe these chips need something special to ensure erasure or complete reprogramming. I think the chips were being programmed with holes in them or something like that. What do you think?

Thanks again, always helpful here.

 

If you have some program running that accesses the hard drive while PP2 is prgramming a chip, it can cause that.

No special erasing is needed, at first you asked how to erase an EEPROM.

If you want to make sure your programming is going to be right, you might close out the programs, your not using, ie hit Cntrl/Alt/delete, and one by one end the programs your not using.

 

Does this include Windows?