I retrofit MCU2, IC2, Tuner2, and FSD Computer into my HW2.0 Car

Here's my story of my DIY HW2.0 retrofit for MCU2, IC2, TUNER2, and FSD Computer:

I want to begin this post by offering the most honest caveat I can: I do not encourage you to repeat anything I have done. In fact, now that Tesla is offering the MCU2 and FSD Computer retrofits officially, I highly recommend you go do that. MCU2 + FSD is wonderful. I am presenting this post to hopefully provide some guidance and entertainment to members of this great community – a place that I’ve found endlessly fun for the past several years during my Tesla ownership. I make no claims that the guidance offered below is correct or suited to your circumstances.

Towards the end of January, late one night while tinkering with my Tesla, I had a realization – I finally knew enough about the Model S/X hardware & software architecture to attempt one of the most involved retrofits I’ve ever done on a vehicle – an MCU2/IC2/Tuner2/APE3 retrofit into my HW2.0 MCU1 Model S. After a LOT of research, and with tons of help from others in this community (thank you to those that helped; you know who you are), I wanted to share my success story of retrofitting MCU2/IC2/Tuner2/APE3 to work in my car. All told – I have a fully working MCU2/IC2/Tuner2/APE3 with all the Theater, Arcade, Caraoke, FM Radio, Web Browser, Dashcam, Sentry, FSD visualizations and other goodies you would expect.

“But Tesla now offers an official MCU2/APE3 retrofit!” you say…” Why would you want to do a retrofit yourself?” Good question…there’s a couple reasons I chose to do this myself:

• I completed the retrofit a couple months before Tesla finally came out with a public announcement that MCU2 retrofits were officially official. I’d been waiting for Tesla to follow-through on Elon’s never-ending tweets promising a retrofit was coming and finally just decided I’d do it myself.
• Tesla charges $2,500 for the MCU2/IC2 retrofit and does not include the XM/FM Tuner2. I thought I’d try getting Tuner2 to work – which I did.
• I found a person with a wrecked 2018 Model S who was willing to sell me the MCU2, IC2, Tuner2, and wiring harness out of the car – everything I needed from a hardware perspective for a reasonable price. All in, I saved roughly $1,000 doing this myself compared to asking Tesla to do it. Honestly though, I probably put 100+ hours into this project and went from knowing nothing to knowing a lot. I didn’t really save time/money; quite the contrary. I did this because it was a ton of fun.
• I got the APE3 (FSD Computer) unit on loan from a friend. I did purchase FSD from Tesla and will have Tesla install my forthcoming APE3 unit whenever they actually do it.

Come along as I take you through my journey of retrofitting the MCU2/IC2/Tuner2/APE3 hardware into my HW2.0 car.

 

[geordi]

Tesla corporate are definitely not thinking any hardware retrofits for the older cars. It is much more valuable to the shareholders to see rising quarterly sale numbers of new cars, and internal features like FSD aren't tracked in the same way in the market.

So they will likely continue to incentivize abandonment of older cars in favor of new sales with the software features they control being transferred. Tesla consider themselves a SOFTWARE company first, not a car company. The market sees it the other way around.

 

[kingpleb]

I think the best bet is to simply do an in place upgrade of the processor.

There is one that's slightly faster than intel made but I doubt we would see any real improvement.
If someone had the money to commission a new one from intel that was backwards compatible but faster, maybe more cores or such then that would be far easier. A heatsink would then likely be needed to dissipate the extra heat but that's workable.

Tesla would detest this most likely as it would make rooting even easier as the processor would be out of their control near enough.

This is purely for S&X though as there is more capacity in these to dissipate the heat IMO

 

[Durzel]

The Intel CPU is air cooled and yes the combined Ryzen and HWx heat sink is looped into the heat pump via the octovalve. I don’t think the cooling is the hardest part. Rigging a separate liquid cooling loop that expels heat away is not difficult. Not great in the summer, but worst case you could expel heat into the cabin.

If are just talking about switching from Intel to Ryzen and don’t care about HW4 and extra GPU capabilities (does Highland even have the dislocated GPU?), you should repost the question in the 3/Y forum. Someone is going to do that: expel heat in a loop into the cabin, pull extra voltage from somewhere else in the car, step up 12v ish to 16v ish and adapt any different connectors.

If the fancy new v13 UI runs on the horizontal Ryzen but not on the horizontal Intel, and there are no cryptographically locked settings in the gateway required, someone is definitely going to create a DIY retrofit.

Same for the vertical screens. If the new roadster ships with a horizontal screen, and no gateway changes would keep that code from running on the old S/X, someone is going to try to get that code running on a retrofit Ryzen vertical screen S/X, as long as the code is modular enough for a to say “vertical screen” and “CanBUS legacy” sure. I guess I am rethinking some of my previous post.

For what it’s worth I did some digging and Model 3/Y does apparently have liquid cooling of the Intel Atom based MCU. It just wasn’t liquid cooled on the S/X.

That at least makes it theoretically more possible (if not likely) that a retrofit with a harness adapter etc could be done, assuming the cooling circuit is up to the job.

Starting to get real FOMO with Atom now that it’s officially legacy.

 

[terranx]

For what it’s worth I did some digging and Model 3/Y does apparently have liquid cooling of the Intel Atom based MCU. It just wasn’t liquid cooled on the S/X.

That at least makes it theoretically more possible (if not likely) that a retrofit with a harness adapter etc could be done, assuming the cooling circuit is up to the job.

Starting to get real FOMO with Atom now that it’s officially legacy.

Physically it's 100% possible. They didn't fundamentally redesign the car to accommodate the computer. Harnesses are not impossible to change, and often even easier to adapt.

I don't think Tesla has any plans to offer a retrofit though. And without root access for both old and new computers, it'd be very difficult for us -- though perhaps we'd have enough access with level of access granted to people who can do security related stuff Service and diagnostic information for independent businesses and individuals involved in the professional maintenance and repair of Tesla vehicles.