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

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

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