I'm genuinely interested in hearing more about the non-starter. I've stripped hundreds of starters over the years and every time I thought, there must be an easier way of doing this!
I think you would seriously struggle with an open ECU.
There are multiple reasons for this but the two main ones would be:
1) Manufacturers charge a ton for mechanics to use their software to acces their ECU and there is a recurring subscription charge for said software so you would be competing against a very monopolistic market.
2) Every car is drasticly different. A universal ECU would need to be a remarkable feat of engineering for it to be able to handle a honda civic as efficiently as it handles a Ford F150. Considering the amount of responsibility ECU's now hold in a vehicle, creating one which can handle parameters for all cars would be almost impossible and probably ridiculously expensive.
yes, but there is less variation than you may think
Is there though?
Valve timing, fuel injection, emission control, idle. All of these factors are vastly different from vehicle to vehicle and the majority are variable dependant on how other elements of the engine are performing.
I think you would seriously struggle with an open ECU. There are multiple reasons for this but the two main ones would be:
1) Manufacturers charge a ton for mechanics to use their software to acces their ECU and there is a recurring subscription charge for said software so you would be competing against a very monopolistic market.
2) Every car is drasticly different. A universal ECU would need to be a remarkable feat of engineering for it to be able to handle a honda civic as efficiently as it handles a Ford F150. Considering the amount of responsibility ECU's now hold in a vehicle, creating one which can handle parameters for all cars would be almost impossible and probably ridiculously expensive.