A few questions about using the Tactrix cable.

I finally have enough money to get some "go" mods for my car. I will be ordering a panel filter, downpipe, and tractrix cable this coming week. Im getting the tactrix cable for the cost of course but I have my doubts about it. First: are there "pre-made" maps available online? Im not going to have alot of time to tune it myself with school and a job, but I still want to be able to put my downpipe and panel filter on and enjoy them without worrying about my car blowing up. Second: when i do find the time to tune it myself how easy/hard is it? Im very mechanically inclined and have worked on many cars but I have never tuned a car. Third: I have a pretty good idea what programs i need for my computer, but im not certain on them. I have seen RomRaider mentioned for flashing i believe. I have a mac so I just want to make sure all these programs will work on my computer. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You won't find a better opensource tune than HERE

How to get started:

http://www.romraider.com/forum/topic5320.html

 

I have no idea whether your Mac will be able to reflash the car with EcuFlash. I'm pretty sure it will let you edit the tune with EcuFlash or RomRaider, and probably it will also do logging with RomRaider. But flashing, I dunno.

 

Tuning is not rocket science. It does take some time to learn the language, and learn how to read data logs, but once you get to that point it's easy to see what changes you can or should make.

 

If you are OK with tuning your car slowly, it doesn't take a lot of time. You can start with a tune online, make some changes to give it a big margin of error*, and flash it. Then log it, tune it, reflash, log again, and repeat until you're at full power. Once you have verified that your tune is safe, there's no need to spend any more time on it than you want. Except the knowledge that there's power on the table.

 

It's a good idea to start following the discussions at http://www.RomRaider.com, as it's a pretty busy forum with a lot of tuning and troubleshooting going on. There are tunes at RomRaider too, I'm pretty sure you could find one to start from.

 

* If you read enough at RomRaider you'll see some posts about how to tweak someone else's tune to make it safe. This will cost you some power of course - you need to log and tune repeatedly to turn up the power until you find the limits.

You won't find a better opensource tune than HERE

 

I have talked to infamous about getting a tune but I would like to to be able to tune my own car. If I just cant get around to it then, yes i will be using an infamous map.

I just read this on Tactrix's website....

NOT ENABLED - DEVELOPMENT IN PROGRESS

 

 

 

• J1850 (PWM/VPW)
  
• EcuFlash logging software
  
• Mac/OSX support
  

 

Does this mean i wont be able to tune with my Mac with snow leopard?

If you have Snow Leopard it means you have an Intel Mac. Either use Parallels and load up Windows in a virtual environment, or use Boot Camp to boot natively into Windows.

Yea I think using Boot Camp will be my best option. And do I need the cable with the adapter set?

Cable should come with no adapter, it's just and OBD to USB.