Quick start

You just installed OpenRemap — here's how to do something useful in the next five minutes. No theory, just commands and what to expect.

Files can be .bin, .ori, or .hex — all are read the same way.

Step 1: Check what you have

Point identify at any ECU binary to see what's inside:

openremap identify ecu.bin

The output prints the manufacturer, ECU family, software version, hardware number, calibration ID, and a confidence tier that tells you how reliably the file was identified. Tiers are High, Medium, Low, Suspicious, or Unknown — High means all key identifiers were found and consistent. (Not sure how to read the tiers? → Confidence scoring)

Step 2: Health-check it

Before doing anything else with the file, run the one-shot safety check:

openremap health ecu.bin

It verifies the known checksums, sanity-checks map axes, compares the map count against the family's expected envelope, looks for erased blocks embedded in data, and flags duplicate VINs. Output is ok/warn/fail per check; the command exits 0 when healthy, 1 when something fails — usable in scripts and CI.

Step 3: Scan a folder

Preview everything in a directory at once:

openremap scan ./my_bins/

This prints a table of every recognised binary — no files are moved. When you're ready to organise, add the flags:

openremap scan ./my_bins/ --move --organize

Files are sorted into manufacturer/family/ subfolders automatically.

Step 4: Cook a recipe

Diff a stock binary against a tuned binary to capture the changes:

openremap cook stock.bin tuned.bin --output recipe.remap

The .remap file is a portable JSON recipe (schema 4.5 — volatile-aware; cook emits 4.4 with maps, lean 4.3 without) that records every byte-level difference, annotates which calibration maps the changes touch, and embeds the identity metadata of both files. You can share it, version it, or apply it to other binaries in the same ECU family.

Step 5: Apply a recipe

Apply a recipe to a target binary:

openremap tune target.bin recipe.remap

This runs a 3-phase process — validate the recipe against the target, apply the patch, and verify the result. If anything looks wrong, it stops before writing.

To run just the pre-flight check without applying anything:

openremap validate before target.bin recipe.remap

⚠ After any modification, recalculate the ECU checksums with your flashing/checksum tool before flashing — OpenRemap verifies but does not correct them. See How it works — safety.

What's next