VW TDI Recall

[davidbrady]

From COBB Tuning for a Subaru WRX STI:

"The great thing about the COBB is that it works with your stock ECU. Subaru spent an incredible amount of time and effort to develop the complex ECU to manage all aspects of your WRX or STI. What the AccessPORT does is simply tweaks the signals to and from the ECU to alter how it manages your engine. A stock ECU is designed to be overly safe, at the expense of extra power. COBB unlocks this, while still maintaining a safe cushion so you can expect more power without more risk."

COBB has a selection of MAPs for the WRX and for other cars to do this. A MAP would be a multidimensional content addressable table and from the above I'd say the MAP would take as an input a vector of actual intercepted sensor data, use that vector to look up content addressable memory (the MAP), and output a new vector with tweaked parameters which is then fed to the stock ECU. The new vector fakes out the ECU to get it do what COBB wants. No need to have the ECU source code.

Also, this software "hook" which allows the insertion of an intercepting MAP would be published by Subaru. The auto manufacturers support the aftermarket world's need to race the cars and to tune them the way they'd like which is great for the Brand! An analogy of this in the PC world would be the BIOS (Basic Input Output System). All PC hardware I/O between the Operating System and the devices (keyboard, mouse, drives, etc) goes thru the BIOS. You can swap out the BIOS to change the behavior. The operating system doesn't know. The BIOS is a layer of indirection. There's a saying in the software community: "All the worlds problems can be solved with a layer of indirection".