Update on my Black MCU situation. TL;DR is that it is FIXED, and I strongly recommend TMC user Tedsk as a guy who can help fix an MCU, quickly and for a fair and reasonable price! Details below:
1) I did email
[email protected]. They didn’t respond for over a week, and then immediately responded after I mentioned I had emailed them to another Tesla Support Employee. Their advice was to take my car in to service and have them address the issue, along with s page of instructions on how to make a service appointment via the phone app. Gee, thanks for that. Of course my car has already been seen by service multiple times, and their advice was to keep doing the “double forced firmware update” to resuscitate the MCU, and eventually replace the MCU for $2400 when that stopped working. Even though that replacement MCU would be subject to the same issue.
2) The solution: After seeking the help of several TMC users on chip replacement, I was directed to
@tedsk, who is near me on the East Coast and had the bandwidth to help. He recommended I send him the MCU, and he could replace the chip and transfer my old data to the new chip. If I wanted anything bigger than the original 8GB chip, I would need to provide it, but he would install it. He said it would be done in about a week.
3) I brought my car in to the local Service Center, and let them try the “double forced firmware update” to revive the black MCU. It took them a day, but it worked. They charged me $175 for the labor, a price we had agreed upon up front, only to be paid if the attempts were successful. Since removing the MCU is a fairly complex task, I asked them to sell me the LTE connectivity upgrade ($500), which includes full MCU removal. Prior to doing the LTE board swap, I asked them to let me have the MCU, so I could Fedex it down to Tedsk for the eMMC chip upgrade.
4) After reading several threads here and on the DIYElectricCars forum, I thought that upgrading to a 64GB was ideal, and that we should leave 32GB unpartitioned. Turns out I may have misunderstood some of those threads, as the 64GB chip was only suggested for MCU2 and newer. So Tedsk and I decided on a 16GB chip instead for my first gen MCU, leaving 8GB unpartitioned. Thanks
@verygreen for input here.
5) Tedsk managed to turn the whole thing around in under two days, and Fedexed the MCU back up to me over the long weekend. I just got the car back from Tesla Service today, after they completed the LTE upgrade. So far, everything looks good. The browser actually works again, which hasn’t been the case in many months. I am hoping I won’t have any further MCU issues, now that we have a much more robust eMMC chip in place. I did have to reprogram my driver profiles and Homelinks, because we intentionally dropped personal data from the old chip so as not to carry forward any corruption, as a precaution.
Here is the link to the chip I used:
SFEM016GB1EA1TO-I-GE-111-STD Swissbit | Mouser
Note that if anyone with a failing MCU2 needs the 64GB eMMC chip, I have a spare now, just PM me if you want it.
Thank you so much Tedsk, you and your services were an absolute lifesaver! Even after paying around $50 in shipping each way plus the LTE upgrade, I still ended up spending less than half the $2400 that Tesla wanted me to pay to replace the MCU. And now with the bigger and more robust chip, I should be protected from future issues caused by excessive logging to the eMMC!
