Drove my truck last night for 1st time in 4 years.... felt great!! Logged some data and burned a new chip for this morning. While doing some other things under the hood I committed the cardinal sin of putting a wrench on the battery and yup.... sparks were flying. After that, the MIL just flashes quickly when the key is on... truck won't start. I figured I smoked the ECM or something so I tried another one.... same thing.

Anyone else have any ideas where to start looking?

 

silly question, did you check the ECM fuse?
I would check the main power wire there after.

 

Yeah, the ECM fuse was fine.... I think I finally stumbled onto the problem. I think there was something wrong with my burner. Even though the chip was verified with the buffer, I don't think it was burning correctly. I put a third ECM into it and used a previously burned stock bin. It worked no problem..... now that I knew this ECM was working, I put the chips with this morning's burns on them into the ECM and got the same error. When I replaced the chip with the known good chip, I was able to check the error flags had logged a 51 "PROM Error".

I went to a newer version of WPP-II software so I'm going to fall back the older version I was using and see if that makes a difference.

 

Well, simply falling back to the older version of the software didn't do it either. I finally decided to go back to all the equipment I used to sucessfully burn the chip the last time. That meant firing up my ancient comp running Win98 and tried a burn with my adapter and AT 29C256 chip. I blanked the chip and did an offset burn into 7000-7FFF, set the adapter jumpers accordingly and burned a bin to it. Took it out to the truck and it works just fine.

So, do you think it's the CPU speed or operating system messing things up. My OLD desktop machine (the one that works with my programmer) is a P3 600 Coppermine clocked to 744MHz. I tried it on my Compaq laptop which is a 1.0GHz P3, but the chips would not work in the ECM. Haven't tried it in my new desktop... P4 3.0GHz.

My programmer is an ETT SPEP Plus. Any comments?

 

I have a couple cheap/ junk laptops that I use for burning chips, scanning, etc. etc.. That old stuff just keeps on ticking, at least for me, and I don't have to worry about if it gets run over.

 

I ran into a similar problem when I was moving from one setup to another. Turned out that the checksum wasn't being updated in the .bin correctly. Are you buring the same .bin on both setups, and still having different results?

Teeleton

 

yes, same .bin used on all attempts.

Edit: correction... you are correct Teeleton. I overlooked the fact that I was updating the .bin with ALDLtoBIN. Does a fine job of applying the corrections to the .bin, but does not update the checksum. If I simply open the updated .bin in WinBin (or the like) and calculate a new checksum, the burn works just fine. I will retry the burner on with the laptop after the next test run. Thanks.