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Originally Posted by TQ
Here in Australia I used the Xede to tune my own 335i. Rumour has it, that Vishnu dropped the Xede because he is either using a rebadged Haltec, or he figured he could make more money copying the Xede and making it himself.
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If you really must know, we dropped the Xede for a number of reason. Reasons that must be pretty well justified considering the 5 years we spent developing it with Chiptorque. In all fairness to Chiptorque, they make a good hardware. But it has it's limitations and shortcomings like everything else. In this particular case, it simply didn't meet our primary requirements.
For instance, in the BMW, we wanted to leave the XEDE powered on all the time for various diagnostic control reasons. However, after a week, we found that it would overhead and lead to hard starting issues. So we had to wire it up to switched power which was less than ideal. With the PROcede, there is no such overheating issues and we implemented it the way we wanted it to. That is just one example. But it's easy to verify.
Another issue was that the Xede required a more complicated firmware updating process. One that required having to give one of the pins constant 12 volts (to get the Xede into 'boot' mode) while cycling Xede power on/off/on. In the case of the BMW, where the ECU remains powered for some time after you turn the ignition off, this proved to be a problem. With the PROcede, we simply upload the new firmware file just like we would a tuning map. Again, easy to verify. Although I don't think any of the current bmw tuners using the Xede have had to do this just yet
Another shortcoming was that there were 4 different Xede units that were not interchangeable. One was meant to be used for voltage based maf sensors. Another for freq based MAF sensors. Another for inductive CAS pick-up. Another for hall effect CAS. With the PROcede, we made sure that the unit was universal. This was addressed at the basic design level, allowing us to develop one single product, not 4.
Another issue was that we ran out of digital inputs/outputs. While, I'm sure this will eventually be addressed with a hardware revision, the current Xede hardware could never control VANOS or defeat speed limiters. You tell me if those are desired features. I could go on but I don't think it's entirely necessary, is it?
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It seems strange, to say the least, that they used the Xede for applications on the Japanese cars, which have more components to control, and now they feel that they need a different platform for the BMW.
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We no longer use the Xede for our japanese car applications. In fact, we recommending it for Subarus over a year ago due to hardware issues. For EVOs, we stopped selling it months ago since it didn't, and never would, have the ability to control variable valve timing. There were plenty of other reasons that really don't belong anywhere on this forum. But to suggest that something sounds strange just means that you aren't aware of the facts.
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The Xede guys are prepared to expand their unit capabilities if need be, so why didn't Vishnu take this route?
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Because we felt we could come up with a product that better met our set of requirements. I think this is pretty reasonable, no?
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I think it is always important to hear the 2 sides of a story, instead of just buying the hipe coming from one of the parties involved.
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Hype?
Shiv