Fairly regularly we get asked something along the lines of, “I had my car tuned by Joe Bob at Fast Bob’s Racing and he used a ___________ (not ours) chip.  I want to make a few changes to the tune myself.  What do I need to do it?”

Here is the answer:

• We do NOT officially support the use of our products with other vendors’ chips AT ALL.
• We do NOT design our products to work with other vendors’ products.
• Chips from other vendors often work (to some extent) with our products because every chip needs to work on the same ECMs, which means they need to do many of the same things, electrically speaking.
• As a rule of thumb, you will probably be able to use our programmers to *READ* most chips from other vendors.  There are some cases when this does not work.
• As a rule of thumb, you will *NOT* be able to use our programmers to PROGRAM chips from other vendors.  Most of the time, this does not work.
• Chips can be deliberately designed to be difficult to communicate with (known problem chips: Diablosport, TS, others?) so there will be cases where you just can’t use them with our tools.
• If you want to be certain that you can read, program or erase a chip from another vendor, don’t use our tools.  Use the tools provided by that vendor.
• If you want to be certain that you will be able to program a chip with one of our programmers, use one of our chips.
• Bottom line: our programmers are designed and tested to work with our chips.  If you can use them with chips from other vendors, it is purely accidental and we do not support it or encourage their use in this way.
• Do not come crying to us if it doesn’t work.  Our response is going to be “buy one of our chips that our programmer was designed to work with.”