Skip to content

SH72543R boot-mode recovery — have 4 test ECUs to donate for development #155

Description

@epicant

Hey MiikaS! I saw your post on RomRaider about needing SH72543R ECUs to develop the boot-mode recovery code for FastECU (https://www.romraider.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=174223).

I have 4 SH72543R ECUs (2015-2017 Subaru WRX FA20DIT, Hitachi SH72543R, 2MB flash - LF79101P/LF79103P calibration IDs) that I'm willing to donate/send for testing. I'm in the US (Denver, CO) but can ship internationally.

What I'm trying to do:

  • Recover a bricked ECU (mid-flash interrupt during Cobb AP map write, corrupt calibration section)
  • FastECU currently reads fine over OBD but the write path needs serial boot recovery support
  • I have known-good 2MB ROM backups, Tactrix OpenPort 2.0, Renesas FDT, and bench-flash hardware (FT232 UART adapter)

What I've confirmed:

  • The VIN/immobilizer data is NOT in the Renesas internal flash — there's an external ROM chip on the board (likely 93C86 or similar SPI EEPROM). No VIN patterns anywhere in the 2MB dump
  • FastECU's memory model already has the correct SH72543R flash block layout: {0x00000000, 0x00006000} + {0x00006000, 0x001FA000}
  • The kernelmemorymodels.h correctly shows NO internal EEPROM for SH72543R (unlike older SH7055/SH7058)
  • Kess V3 can recover these via boot mode (confirmed on RomRaider)

Questions:

  1. What specific vector/register values do you need to identify for the boot-mode recovery?
  2. I see you have SH72543R listed as an MCU type in kernelmemorymodels.h but without ram/kernel/eeprom blocks defined — do you need the RAM layout and kernel load address?
  3. Would an Arduino-based boot-mode flasher be feasible? The SH-2A boot protocol is simple UART (9600 baud init → negotiate speed → flash commands). I found the renesas-bootmode Python library (github.com/gregjhogan/renesas-bootmode) that already supports SH-2A.

Happy to send ECUs wherever needed — these are paperweights to me right now and I'd love to see FastECU get full SH72543R recovery support. I can also test builds on Windows with Qt/MinGW if that helps.

Thanks for all your work on FastECU!

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions