NefMoto

Hello, Noob here.
I have a 2016 Q3 with Simos 18.2 ECU. As none of the major tuners provide any tunes for this ECU and having a little programming and microcontroller experience I thought I'd have a crack myself.
As this is my daily the plan is to have a second, cloned ECU I can play with and if i run into trouble can just switch back to the original one.
Is it easier to remove the immo instead of cloning ECU ? How does that affect keyfob operation? Do i need a keyfob coded to the second ECU?

Can anyone recommend hardware/software ? I'm looking at the SM2pro but not sure if it supports Simos 18.2.  There seems to be a lack of support/info for the Simos 18.2 in general. Can anyone point me in the right direction ?
Thanks in advance

Simostools or VW_Flash.

Reprogramming a spare ECU requires boot mode, because OBD/UDS programming isn’t possible unless the immo is released. https://github.com/bri3d/TC1971_CAN_BSL or a big commercial tool (bFlash, AT, MMS, etc) for this (the ECU needs to be opened).

The ECU is a slave unit in immo, not a master, so key enrollment won’t be affected.

Simos 18.2 is basically the same thing as Simos 18.1/6 with some slight pinout differences. It shares the same SC8 project type so reflashing is the same.

Thanks for the informative reply. Much appreciated.
Your link did not work though,  it returned a 404, not found.
 So the key fob is coded to the cluster and that is the master in the immo chain?
 I’m not afraid to open it up and have a deeper dive into boot mode. Found some info on another forum at ecuconnections.com and a couple of you tube vids, just need to decide on a cheap hardware solution

https://github.com/bri3d/TC1791_CAN_BSL

Raspberry Pi. Perfect, thanks. Got a couple of them lying around