[Brandt51]

Can some smart persons explain some ECU stuff for me please?

What are the DMEs inside the ECUs? How do they get locked up or ‘bricked’? Does that ruin the ECU? Unrecoverable?

And the X5M has two ECUs?

[weinerbarn]

There are many ECU's for the BMW vehicles. They each have an acronym to describe their function. The engine controller(s) are called DME (Digital Motor Electronics). On the V8 engines there are 2 and I4 and I6, there are just 1.

Most "computers" have a combination of cpu, ram/memory and disk/storage. The ECU's in the car are no different. They have flash which stores the bootable code or operating system. Sometimes the OS is on the same storage chip as the configuration data and sometimes not. When an ECU gets bricked, it means the contents loaded on the flash are corrupt or maybe the wrong code was loaded by accident (for a different ECU or generation). In most cases they are recoverable but it takes special equipment and connecting it to a bench setup outside the vehicle. The reason is it needs to be repaired/recovered at a low level of communication ... think reloading your computer from USB or DVD after it gets corrupt. When it's "bricked", it usually just means it won't boot normally and lost its ability to communicate on the BMW vehicle network to reload software ... like an ethernet adapter not coming up on a computer.

[Brandt51]

Thank you!

[Brandt51]

After the adventure concludes, I'll have a story about why I asked.

[Brandt51]

So we had the DMEs unlocked for a tune. Shortly after having the car back, an uncommanded OTA update started and then failed while it was parked and we were running errends. Car wouldn’t go into neutral. A dealer the race shop was cool with picked it up with a special truck. A dude was flown out from the factory to reprogram it becaus the failed update required it I guess. Unfortunately the tuned ECUs were locked up still. But apparently weren’t? After the race shop got it back they had it running right away. And since we already had down pipes on, we got the DMEs unlocked and tuned it again. All is well again.

But this time I made sure the OTA update option is turned off. Simple issue had me worried big time! I thought I was going to be buying a pair of ECUs. Def lucked out. The race shop and dealer were good as hell.

[r33_RGSport]

Originally Posted by Brandt51

So we had the DMEs unlocked for a tune. Shortly after having the car back, an uncommanded OTA update started and then failed while it was parked and we were running errends. Car wouldn’t go into neutral. A dealer the race shop was cool with picked it up with a special truck. A dude was flown out from the factory to reprogram it becaus the failed update required it I guess. Unfortunately the tuned ECUs were locked up still. But apparently weren’t? After the race shop got it back they had it running right away. And since we already had down pipes on, we got the DMEs unlocked and tuned it again. All is well again.

But this time I made sure the OTA update option is turned off. Simple issue had me worried big time! I thought I was going to be buying a pair of ECUs. Def lucked out. The race shop and dealer were good as hell.

I believe OTA will re-locked ECU.
IIRC, that’s what my G8x customers with unlocked ECU told me.

[Brandt51]

[QUOTE="r33_RGSport;30627260"]I believe OTA will re-locked ECU.
IIRC, that’s what my G8x customers with unlocked ECU told me.

It def locks up F95 ECUs. Nice lil lesson learned. It’s prob lucky to be honest that a truck could get to where the car was parked at. It was an uncommanded OTA update, but I was going to update it at home on the Wi-Fi and it might of been in a rough spot. So turn your updates off!

Oh, I should mention I was told that it’s not uncommon for the OTA updates to fail either. I just had tuned ECUs that really made a mess of it all.