FIS-Control configurator

FIS-Control is a small box that plugs in behind a VAG instrument cluster or at the CAN gateway, reads the diagnostic data every control unit already reports, and draws it on the cluster’s own screen: boost, knock retard, lambda, oil and gearbox temperatures, readings from sensors wired straight to it. It is driven from the wiper stalk. Everything it shows is set in one settings file, fis_control.dat.

The maker’s online configurator edits that file, and it is accurate and hard to use: roughly two thousand fields on one page, most of them numbers you are expected to know already — control unit 01, group 115, value 4, view 5. This one asks what engine the car has and what you want to see, fills in the numbers, and keeps everything else a tab away. It writes the same file.

How to use it

Start on Quick setup. Pick the engine, whether FIS-Control reaches it over the K-line or CAN, and tick the screens you want; it fills the nine presets in that order and points the boost display at the right reading. Then check the result on Screens, where every preset reads in words — “Engine, group 115, Boost actual” — rather than as four numbers.

Boost & sensors is for anything wired to FIS-Control itself, with a check that each sensor is on an input it can work on. Display holds the language, units, start logo and the rest of the unit’s behaviour. Start logos turns any picture — the 9CS logo is one click — into the nine logos the unit can show at start-up, with a pixel editor for touching them up; they save as a second file, startlogo.dat. Advanced has collections, custom value labels, which control units and groups are listed when browsing, and the user mods — features built for one car or one person, which most people should leave off.

The box at the foot of the configurator lists anything that would misbehave before the file goes near the car: a boost bar with no range, a boost screen the boost display is not pointed at, autostart opening an empty preset.

Getting the file onto the unit

The file moves over RS-232 or Bluetooth with the XModem protocol, from the unit’s SETTINGS → FLASH MEMORY menu.

• To edit what is already on the unit, choose SEND SETTINGS there, receive it on a PC with a terminal program that speaks XModem, and open that file here. Starting from the unit’s own file keeps anything a newer firmware stores that this page does not know about.
• To load a file made here, choose LOAD SETTINGS and send fis_control.dat the same way. Do not then choose SAVE SETTINGS on the unit: the new settings take over the next time the ignition comes on, and saving would write the old ones back over them.
• Start logos go the same way, with LOAD STARTLOGO and startlogo.dat.

The maker’s Android and Windows apps can do the transfer over Bluetooth instead of a terminal program. They are on the FIS-Control download page, with the firmware, the start logos and the logfile converter.

Is it really the same file?

It is checked, not assumed. The file layout was read out of the maker’s configurator, and ten random configurations plus the factory defaults were built by both — theirs in their page, this one in its tests — and compared byte for byte. They match. Two deliberate differences: limits are rounded to the nearest thousandth where theirs truncates (1.005 stays 1.005), and opening a file and saving it keeps bytes this page does not understand, where theirs resets them. The start logo file was checked the same way, against the maker’s own logo pack: its nine logos, rebuilt from their pictures, match pixel for pixel.

Fitting the unit and coding the cluster so it will accept it are in fitting FIS-Control and coding the cluster. What the groups hold is in VAG measuring blocks.