Bmw M3 Alpha N Software Inc

Oh, my friends. You have such hate in your dark hearts. So much anger for the cars. And I love every bit of it. Many performance enthusiasts love the sound of the E46 M3 CSL. The Alpha N tune is designed for enthusiasts that want to run a CSL airbox, but do not have a CSL style ECU or OEM CSL snorkel. The Alpha-N tune does not add more or less power than the TTFS performance E46 M3 tune we offer. The Alpha N tune may.

I went into miller performance to get rid of my alpha-n to go with the miller MAF. Was never able to get the car tuned right, from day one with alpha-n. Car has been running poorly for a long time. Now I am involved in a super secret project right now with miller performance.

Im not versed in tuning or anything going on in the motor to explain whats going on. I should have more info on what we are doing to my car in a few days. But from what I gathered is that he wants to do something with the alpha-n and the maf conversion together. I may be totally wrong in what I just posted. Here is a link to their facebook page. He will be explaining more on there. Here is the write up from the tuner.

Available for purchase soon. Taking the car to them Thursday, they want to go over a few things.

I have only had a chance to drive it home from the shop. Felt so much more crisp throughout all gears and rpms. More to follow after i drive more.

Unfortunately, my powersteering bracket that bolts to the head broke, looks like 4 of the 5 bolts rattled out and caused the bracket to break. Had to cut the belt and throw a bolt in to drive. The Miller Alpha-N system is the only 100% Factory ECU controlled “MAF-less” engine management system for early model M cars. Unlike competitor’s products that require a piggyback to intercept and convert the signal; or worse, a completely new standalone after-market engine computer, the Miller Alpha-N system was developed to be fully plug and play and utilize the factory ECU for the entire calibration method.

To achieve the stock ECU control of an Alpha-N system we have recalibrated and recoded key aspects of the ECU’s operating functions and tables, how they are used and how they interact with each other so that the stock ECU can run the car as if it left like that from the factory. This ensures great performance not only at wide open throttle, but for idle and partial throttle as well. The benefits of an ECU controlled system When using competitors piggyback based systems in parallel with the stock engine management, you are sacrificing performance and control. Other systems out there which use a piggyback to intercept signals, make their changes and send that to the factory ECU. Sounds simple – and it is. However, you lose signal response by doing so and in an Alpha-N system, signal response is everything.

After studying these popular alternatives and watching how the ECU reacts to the information provided by the piggyback controller, we felt there was a superior way to design and implement this management system. Allowing the factory ECU to use an uninterrupted signal DIRECTLY from any given sensor, creating new tables, reconfiguring existing tables and their inputs and how they interact with these tables provides superior performance in drive-ability and tune-ability. Another thing that these competitors systems cannot offer is full control of the factory tune parameters. These piggyback style systems only allow you to modify fuel. They do not offer you control of ignition timing, RPM limits and idle speeds and so on which actually limits the optimization of your vehicles tune. Don’t be fooled by the statement from competitors products like, “Timing does not need to be changed, a suitable complimentary chip is provided to optimize timing, etc. For your car.” This is simply false.

Sure, you can be provided with a one size fits all timing map but that will leave you power on the table as it must be safe for EVERY car that uses it. Another major thing that many people do not understand is that no two engines are alike. Even if they are built the exact same, they will NEVER perform identically.

With an Alpha-N type system, specific car calibration is key to extract the most power SAFELY from the engine. With the Miller Alpha-N system, you have full control over both FUEL and IGNITION making your engine run at its best performance. The Miller system allows standalone-engine-management-like control and adjustability for your factory ECU which saves you from the time and money spent on essentially starting from scratch.

So what is Alpha-N? El Americano The Cartoon Wiggles. It refers to an engine management approach that does not have a true load input available for fuel calculation.

“Alpha,” refers to throttle angle and “N” refers to Engine RPM. On a typical engine management system the ECU requires a load signal from a metering device.

An Air Flow meter (which is found on this era of BMW’s) a Mass Air Flow sensor, a Manifold Absolute Pressure sensor etc are all devices used by stock ECU’s to help calculate engine LOAD. Engine LOAD is simply a calculation based on this load signal, RPM and a constant that determines how much air is entering the engine and how much fuel needs to be supplied for that given amount of air. With an Alpha-N system, you do not measure that intake of air so you need to deal with fuel differently.

You pre-calibrate fuel requirements based on engine RPM and throttle angle only and use other sensors and correction maps to adjust the fuel required for determined conditions or environmental factors. The reason someone would want to use this on a BMW M car would be in situations when a massive inlet carbon air box is being used. When your inlet is too large you dramatically reduce signal quality across a load sensor such as a MAF. When you lose signal quality you lose performance and drive-ability. Alpha-N is a great solution to this kind of intake system as it offers excellent drive-ability and much better performance.

There is no one size fits all software for an Alpha-N system and is why the WAR Chip is included in the system package. We have done our best to be able to provide near perfect base tunes to start with, but one must realize Alpha-N systems require car specific refinements to operate at 100% no matter what. The WAR Chip editing software is laid out in a relatively simple manner so the user can massage the tune on their own; if one does not feel comfortable with this, we can help tune your car remotely as well provided you can supply us with the required running data. This is basically the same thing Jim C/Cyntex did back in the 90's from what I've seen except with the Miller WAR chip, one can switch between 4 different preset maps. Since there's no real time tuning this means a lot of dyno time with every future engine modification change and the eprom would have to be rewritten.correct?

Perhaps this is the shortcoming of this approach? The MAXX unit shows real time data and allows for rolling road tuning. The upgraded unit also supports wideband closed loop. MAXX doesn't control ignition however, ignition timing is still controlled by the chip and trimmed by the FQS. I was part of the first batch to run the MAXX AN piggyback and have had great success with it over the 10+ years I've had it.

Worked right out of the box with basemaps. I tuned it on a narrowband first, then a wideband. I hit 209rwhp on the stock 2.3 with cams, 48mm TB's, evo headers from narrowband rolling road tuning. It's done everything well and even better with the wideband closed loop upgrade so I'm not sure why Tolofou/BattleM3 never got his to run right but there are many factors. TPS calibration is critical. Here's a quote from Jimmy P on Cyntex EPROM based Alpha N.

' Thats because it was a black art back then and pre-dated the internet. You will find little to no documentation on it. The factory cars used it,,, and in the earliest days had a fake AFM there for show. Then at some point they stopped having the fake AFM. I assume the homologation rules changed.

There are very few photos of the Grp A cars with the fake AFM mounted up but they are out there. The factory cars used the ECU4A John Johnson who can be a polarizing person I know, is an encyclopedia of this stuff. In the USA, Alpha N style fueling as it applies to our S14 engines became a project of Jim Conforti and the two owners of Cyntex, a tuning company outside of philadelphia. They made a chip that replaced the stock eprom, along with a short adapter harness and a new full sweep TPS. That chip took the throttle position and translated it to replace the combined signal from the AFM and the stock TPS into just reading the throttle opening.

It was marketed for a short time through Racing Dynamics. Cyntex also sold setups themselves out of their small shop in Philadelphia. I have both versions. The 'Cyntex' system worked REALLY well,,, IF it was tuned for the car it was on,,, but had serious adaptability limitations. It simply really needed to be tuned for each car. Too many people tried one size fits all applications of it, thus hurting some motors and all of a sudden Alpha N style fueling got a very bad name in the US. It then almost vanised from the USA for a decade (barring a few of us brave souls who knew how to use it).

It reappeared when the MAXX AN systems hit the market. To his credit, MAXX or John Johnson was a pretty strong figure in re-introducing Alpha N style engine mgt into the US. It was considered a black art by many for a long time. Jim Conforti tried to poison anyone who would read his writing on the concept. I could write way more, much of it has been written here already if you search. Many discussions. Last edited by jimmy p.;, 05:57 PM ' I'm sure the Miller AN method is improved over the Cyntex version but seems to me they both have the same shortcomings.

You would need some sort of data acquisition and/or a dyno since there's no real time interface. Would it be fair to say, the customers car is benefiting from being dynotuned more than just the switch from MAXX to Miller? Some interesting discussion. LDR version: They are doing a PnP chip based AN with the Miller WAR chip that allows you to switch between 4 different ignition/fuel maps with a switch after the maps have been loaded.

There is no real time tuning so it's a trial and error affair and you can't monitor what's going on on the fly without data acquisition. I raised my concerns with this method since it's been done before. They claimed this is how BMW would have done it. They had no clue Cyntex existed or that BMW actually used a piggyback.

I have a 325 that im going to be doing a lot of work to. Im going to be converting my car to a Coil on plug system that requires a new ECU and a wiring harness and all fun stuff thats the easy part. A long with all that im making a custom ITB intake from the E46 M3 and custom building the CSL air box cause im not spending $3000 for that thing and i can buy the material and build it working on that but. What im needing help with is im getting the ECU from a E36 325i non-vanos and to make the intake work i need to get the Alpha-n tuning software and i dont know where i need to go to get that thing. If anyone knows where or how or even if theres Alpha-n software for the E36 M50 ECU let me know please.

I plan on taking the car to bimmer fest on the west coast next gathering. I have a bit done to the car but we will see. So far as i can tell its a vary unique setup im after so heres hoping. I have a 325 that im going to be doing a lot of work to. Im going to be converting my car to a Coil on plug system that requires a new ECU and a wiring harness and all fun stuff thats the easy part.

A long with all that im making a custom ITB intake from the E46 M3 and custom building the CSL air box cause im not spending $3000 for that thing and i can buy the material and build it working on that but. What im needing help with is im getting the ECU from a E36 325i non-vanos and to make the intake work i need to get the Alpha-n tuning software and i dont know where i need to go to get that thing. If anyone knows where or how or even if theres Alpha-n software for the E36 M50 ECU let me know please. I plan on taking the car to bimmer fest on the west coast next gathering. I have a bit done to the car but we will see. So far as i can tell its a vary unique setup im after so heres hoping The M50 isn't already COP? Contact SplitSecond for the custom Alpha N.

The m50 ECU is a PROM based system. Any chip burner and EEPROM emulator will do what you are looking for.

Alpha-N is a way of tuning, not software. You will base your fuel maps on TPS and RPM only, can't recognize load without an air meter of some sort. The alpha-n looks at the throttle position and a few other things that i cant remember to calculate the amount of ait going into the car and for how much fuel to squirt in to he chambers for detonation thats the reason the alpha-n was created BMW used it for the E46 M3 CSL for the CSL did not use a MAF at all. The alpha-n looks at the throttle position and a few other things that i cant remember to calculate the amount of ait going into the car and for how much fuel to squirt in to he chambers for detonation thats the reason the alpha-n was created BMW used it for the E46 M3 CSL for the CSL did not use a MAF at all. Right, TPS and RPM based tuning is called 'Alpha-N' since there is no way to meter, measuring air load on the engine becomes void.

If you get an emulator like I mentioned above you can tune the ECU yourself with a laptop, the software is free (TunerPro). I tune Motronic systems often with it.

Alpha-N has been around a lot longer than the e46. Hotrodders have been using to tune ITB's on v8's since the 80's. There's no other sensor being used in Alpha-N other than the TPS and engine speed.

Here's a good explanation. Why would you ever do that? A carb would be better at that point. I see absolutely no point in alpha n given all the product out there that will offer far better performance for the same if not cheaper price.

1984 325e 2000 323i Alpha-N is not a product, nor does it cost anything to accomplish if you have the right equipment. In a situation where you have ITB's, in order to meter the air, you have to use a plenum that's fed through an air meter of some sort (AFM, MAF,) which doesn't allow one to take full advantage of the ITB's. MAP based ITB's get's just as complicated since you have to have some sort of vacuum canister to ease the pulses on the sensor and a vacuum line going to each TB behind the throttle plate.