Anyway, the installation wasn't quite textbook. I was expecting to pull the ECM out of my passenger side fender, slap the TwEECer on, and put it all back together. In a Mustang, it might have been that simple, I don't know. In a Ranger though, the white molded plastic bracket that holds the ECM into place isn't big enough to hold the ECM and TwEECer.
In this pic, you see the ECM and the TwEECer box on the end of the ECM plugged into the J3 port. You can also see the USB (white) & tune selector (flat black) wires.
I had to cut away the "WARRANTY VOID IF REMOVED" sticker covering the port.
The TwEECer is butted up right against the plastic "cage" that holds the ECM into place. The extra thickness this added to the ECM prevented me from being able to bolt the ECM back in.
So I clipped off the white piece that just wouldn't reach, and used velcro to secure it in.
And finally, I had to route the tune selector and USB wire. The USB wire will stay wrapped up in my glovebox for the time being until I can come up with some other creative way to secure it, but still make it easy to access. But the tune selector is a piece you need to be able to get to, but you don't want bringing a whole lot of attention to. After all, one of the very neat things you can do with the TwEECer is make a "Valet tune" which prevents the vehcile from accelerating over some set speed. That can also serve as a nice anti-theft device. Here's the tune selector, and where I decided to mount it:
I loostened the allen-screw in the selctor knob so I could mount it behind that plastic, then put the knob back on and tightened it back down. While travelling down the road, I can reach it without much difficulty at all.
With all that installed, there are a few idiosyncracies that I'm sorting out, but reading from and writing to the ECM are very straight forward. What isn't straight forward is configuring the software to display the numbers correctly. Ford evidentally organized the data in their ECMs in one of about a dozen different ways or strategies as the software refers to it. You have to either know what family your ECM is in (look in the documentation and on the forums) or start thumbing through each "strategy" and look at your parameters to see if they are completely off-the-wall values or believable. For example, look at A/C Max Temp Cutout. Intuituvely, I think this might disable AC if the engine was getting too hot. I was suspicious when I saw the value at 512°. I continued thumbing through the configurations until I got a value that looked more reasonable like 240°. Sure enough, after reading further in the documentation, I found that my A9P ECM is in the A9M family, which is DIFFERENT than the A9L family. The A9L organizes its info quite differently and so I can't make my ECM act exactly like an A9L since TwEECers don't actually write to the ECM's memory.
If you read long enough in the documentation, you'll eventually find all this out, but the software still has a ways to go in order to be "intuitive" to newbies. This morning, I was able to do some rhudimentary real-time datalogging so I could see all the various sensor values like ACT, ECT, spark adv, RPM, etc. Once I finally got that to work, all I could say was....Cool
