You mention Ford. This process is going to be different manufacturer to manufacturer. There's no central repository of ECU files on the Internet because the files are technically the copyrighted material of the vehicle manufacturer and are worth money to many folks. This is a bad combination because there's both legal risk and a massive market for sucking up all your bandwidth as soon as you offer them for free, and if you could get money for them anyway... you see where this is going.

Since this is mostly an ME7 and VW AG centric forum, I will explain VW AG's process. For VW AG cars, flash data is easiest to acquire from dealer update files. These dealer update files are shipped to dealers as a DVD set called the "Flashdaten" which can be found online in torrents and the like.

They're in a nonstandard encrypted ZIP format called FRF, which for modern ECUs contains a standardized XML container format called ODX and for older ECUs contained the firmware payload directly.

The payloads inside an FRF or ODX differ ECU to ECU. So you need a collection of tools to go from an FRF to a BIN. First you need an FRF extractor which can convert the encrypted ZIP into the XML container (ODX). This one works: https://github.com/trick77/frfdumper . Now you have an ODX. For an older ECU, the FLASH-MEMORY nodes in this XML file will contain the BIN content verbatim. For a newer ECU, it contains reflash data which is encrypted in the form the ECU expects, so a dump directly from the ECU hardware or leaked data is necessary to extract the encryption keys from the ECU hardware and decrypt the payload. I did this for Simos18 ECUs here: http://nefariousmotorsports.com/forum/index.php?topic=6583.msg123050#msg123050 but the process will differ for each ECU.

In short: The update mechanisms by which the files are distributed to dealers are manufacturer specific. You will have the best luck asking on a tuning forum specific to the vehicle you are looking for, but be aware that most tuning forums don't like people looking for handouts (if you explain what you are trying to do that isn't "charge someone money to badly tune their car", people will be more helpful), and most "general" automotive / car forums are clueless and incompetent when it comes to this stuff.

thanks for updating me on the etiquette of car tuning. I don't really see why such things should be secretive: not everyone wants or will learn tuning and by keeping things secretive, it only increases the (ridiculous) cost or profits certain people in the market. Even if I were to "profit" from this, it's only on a small scale as you would need a team going to package things up.  Furthermore, i'm pretty sure most commercial tuners would prefer to use commercial tools like HPtuners etc.

I also found out that there are numerous software updates to a ECU hardware. . which begs the question what's the difference and why the multiple software updates.

I would gladly help someone tweak some values given the hardware number and bin to save his old car from breaking down or sputtering toxic gas just cuz the outputs can't keep up with the parts.

I see. I won't know much about car tuning because i'm not in the scene (yet). So i won't know how competitive it is. But I guess since people want to optimize their cars or even outbattle each other, then they would have the ability to fork out more time/money/energy. But I've never thought of or heard of people going to workshop to tune their ride (normally people around me just shell out some Gs to get a muscle car or AMG that sorta thing)

but yea, i'm just requesting bin files to RE; maybe make my own obd scanner while at it.

d3irb

I mean, no one compares to you Nyet

Edit: links are dead