heard tunercat was a good way to reprogram fan......how do i get it and is it easy to use?

 

tunercat.com, works great

 

I've used it myself, and it does work great. ALTHOUGH, be very careful. The screen saver on my laptop kicked in 1/2 way into programming the PCM. It hosed the PCM, I had to buy a couple of new flash chips and sockets from MadZ28 (Ion Solton). It was a royal PITA. The good thing is I received lots of help from TunerCat to get it running again.

If I were to do it again, I would build myself a benchtop programmer. After talking to some people that program many PCMs this is the safest way to go. Here's how you do it:

How do I make a bench top programming setup?

Here's another handy tool if you're working with more than one PCM (as I am). Or if your motor is out, but you want to do some PCM work. Cost is under $5 for the harness parts, and about $32 for the power supply (you can use a car battery, but only temporarily, as it will be drained). Very easy to build.

First, collect the components. You can get everything from RadioShack.com (hey, I never leave the house anymore to shop!). Now, you can buy these as a whole connector at the store, but if you're doing it over the 'net, here are the part numbers and descriptions:

(1) Crimp type cable mount D-sub, 25 pin Female, 910-4770, $.62 / ea
(15) Gold Pin Sockets for above plug and for PCM pins, 910-4772, $.09/ea
(1) Plastic hood for D-sub connector, 910-1536, $.72/ea
(1) 13.8 VDC Regulated Power Supply, 910-0442, $31.95/ea
About 8-10 feet of 24 or 26 gauge wire

Now, I just tore apart some old equipment that I had laying around, yanked a 15 volt regulated power supply from it, and put two diodes in series to drop the voltage going in to the PCM down to about 14 volts. You need the voltage higher than 12 volts, but lower than 15. So 13.8 regulated is a good target.

What you'll need to do is to make a wiring harness using the gold pin sockets. There are four required for the ground (0V) wires, and four required for the hot (+12V) wires. I did them in a daisy chain - strip the end of the wire, crimp and solder a pin on there, cut the wire a few inches up, stripped *both* pieces of wire, crimped and soldered both of those pieces to another socket, and kept going until I'd covered the 4 pins I needed.

For the ground wire, I made the first jump from D1 (Blue 1) to C32 (Gray 32), about an 8 inch piece of wire. Next, we jump from C32 to A18 (Red 18) using about 4 inches of wire. Next we loop from A18 to A2 (the adjacent pin) with a loop of about 1.5" of wire. From there, we go to the ground terminal of the power supply.

For the +12V wire, my first terminal is at B15 (Black 15). From there, I jump with about 1.5" of wire over to B31 (the adjacent pin), and from there about 1.5" of wire to B30 (right next door!), and then have about a 4 inch piece of wire jumping to D3 (Blue 3). From D3 I jump to the positive terminal of the power supply.

Now for the ALDL Interface. You need at least two wires - ground (Pin 1 on my converters), and serial data (Pin 5 on my converter, D30 (Blue 30) on the PCM. You may need to provide 12V, but most converters were shipped with port power option enabled, and all desktops should support the port power option.

That clear as mud? Email me if you have any questions!

 

Yeah, if you're going to play with it a lot, budget for having your PCM socketed at some point, because you're probably going to kill it eventually. Or rather Windows is going to kill it eventually.

If you are just going to set the fans once and leave it alone then the odds are good that you won't hose it.

Of course, once you have the ability to tweak all those settings you're unlikely to just leave it alone...