Picking a Calibration to Log and Flash
Atlas and OEM Calibrations
Officially Supported Calibrations
What is officially supported?
Atlas provides at least one unmodified OEM calibration for every supported vehicle. Atlas does not ship with any pre-loaded, modified ("off the shelf") maps. For these off-the-shelf calibrations, please check in with our community for community-developed OTS maps; Discord is a great place to ask. They are typically well-tested and will be a great platform for you to start from.
In order to make the process of development easier, Atlas only supports the latest calibration from the manufacturer for each particular vehicle configuration. This is the standard procedure for most modern tuning softwares. For example, if your vehicle is a 2022 USDM Subaru WRX MT, there will be a specific calibration that represents the most up-to-date ROM that exists for your ECU, and this is the calibration that Atlas will provide and support.
What if the OEM releases a new calibration?
As new calibrations are released by the OEM and NAMR is made aware of these, we update Atlas to support them and release new versions of the software package accordingly. As this takes place, older calibrations are removed from the pre-loaded list to deter our end-users from programming these out-of-date calibrations. This same process takes place in the OEM software packages provided to dealerships; as new bundles are made available to dealerships, older calibrations are removed from rotation by the OEM.
However, any prior supported calibrations will continue to be supported for backwards-compatibility for flashing and logging alike. Our official stance is that when you find yourself in this situation, you should promptly rebase your tune onto the latest calibration available from the OEM. We strongly encourage this, as newer calibrations quite often involve recalls for various nuisances and potentially serious safety issues that have been identified.
If you live in the United States, you can typically see what issues are being addressed in newly released calibrations by searching for safety bulletins on the NHTSA website: https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls.
Older Calibrations
What makes a calibration "old"?
As OEMs identify issues in their released calibrations, their corresponding software vendors supply updated calibrations to both the factory and the dealership network through internal processes. This activity from the OEM is typically seen as frequently as a quarterly basis and will even take place even after a particular model year of a vehicle has been retired, as deemed necessary by the feedback the OEM is receiving on their active calibrations.
What this means for you is your target vehicle may be running a calibration that - even if tuned - is presently out-of-date. While Atlas will recognize this calibration on the vehicle, it is likely that if it is old and out-of-date (super-ceded by a newer calibration), it is unsupported for both logging and flashing.
What do I do if my vehicle is on an unsupported calibration?
Although your calibration may be presently unsupported by Atlas, that doesn't mean you can't replace it with a newer calibration so you can log and tune your supported vehicle.
If you'd like to keep a copy of your old calibration for any reason, see our page on Cloning an ECU. You won't be cloning the calibration to another ECU, in this case, but that documentation page covers downloading it so you can preserve it somewhere if you ever want to flash it back to the ECU for any reason. It is worthwhile stating that this step is not strictly required to tune your car with Atlas.
Then, you can start by flashing the latest calibration for your car to the vehicle with Atlas. This will give you the same result as if you had dropped your car off at the dealership for recall service on the ECU. Once you're on the latest OEM calibration, you're all set to start logging with Atlas if you would like to collect base-line logs. From there, we recommend copying and modifying your base calibration to create your own tune, so the pre-shipped, latest OEM calibration remains unmodified if you ever need it.
Why does Atlas not support these?
When OEMs release new calibrations, we often see that the offsets for ROM elements such as tables, parameters, and so forth will change in unpredictable ways. Although the reason isn't significant to us, this could possibly be due to the unique development workflows each OEM implements to release any given calibration.
Atlas has an extensive set of modern tools, workflows, and automations built in to the software that enable the development team at NAMR to quickly adopt support of new calibrations by generating definitions against an unknown, new ROM file. However, nothing is perfect, and we take our quality assurance of definition accuracy very seriously. It is our policy that we will invest our time in new calibrations, but we do not extend support for calibrations that pre-date the initial support date of a given vehicle model on Atlas.
This means: if Atlas supports a 2022 USDM WRX MT on July 1st, 2024, any calibrations that were released prior to the calibration that was the latest as of that date are unsupported.
It really boils down to time and alignment with OEM to uphold safety and emissions standards. It takes time for us to bring in a new calibration, and we can't guarantee a uniform experience across our supported calibrations if we spread our development team thinly over several definitions for every single model. Having one supported calibration per model streamlines our development workflow so we can keep developing great features for our community.