identify

If you have a file that came from a car's computer — an ECU — identify tells you what that file is.

Think of it as showing the file to an expert who reads the ECU's name tag. The expert tells you:

• who made the ECU (Bosch, Siemens, Delphi, …),
• which family it belongs to (the ECU's model line, like "EDC17"),
• the software version stored inside,
• and how sure they are about all of this.

That last part matters: OpenRemap can only work with ECUs it already knows. identify is the honest first step — it tells you whether your file is supported before you try anything else.

It never changes the file. It only reads it.

When do I need it?

• Before anything else. Every workflow starts with identify, because the next steps need to know which ECU they are dealing with.
• When you want to reuse a tune on another car. OpenRemap matches tunes to ECUs by a name tag (the match key). If the tags don't match, the tune does not apply. identify shows you the tag.
• When you have a mystery file. Run it and see: supported file, or not?

Try it (2 minutes)

Put a file next to the command and run:

openremap identify my-file.bin

If the file is a known ECU, you will see something like this (shortened):

  my-file.bin
  Bosch · EDC17

  Manufacturer      Bosch
  ECU Family        EDC17
  Match Key         EDC17C66::1037541778
  File Size         2,097,152 bytes

  ── Confidence ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Tier   HIGH

If every field says unknown, OpenRemap does not know this ECU yet — see Does OpenRemap support my file?.

Understanding the answer

You only need to remember two things:

1. HIGH or MEDIUM confidence with a match key → good to go. You can cook and tune this file.
2. Suspicious confidence or a missing match key → slow down. OpenRemap will tell you what looks wrong and why.

For the full story on confidence, see Confidence scoring — in depth.

Does OpenRemap support my file?

If everything comes back unknown, the file is probably from an ECU family that OpenRemap does not know yet. That is not the end of the road:

• You can still look at it with other tools (like the map scanner).
• If you are comfortable helping, adding a new family is open source work — see Contributing.

For developers

identify is one action on the engine, and the same action is available in all three ways of using OpenRemap:

New to the three ways? See CLI, API & RPC — the three interfaces.

Where to go next