I like tuning engines. Manufacturers do not want to facilitate this. The solution? A standalone performance-oriented ECU. There's a few problems though. The first, who is making plug-in ECUs for a Ducati Monster? No one, that's who.
The second problem is integration with the rest of the vehicle. Swap out the ECU and everything else stops working. Unacceptable. It's not like Ducati are going to provide you a spec for how any of this actually works, after all…
This talk is going to go over reverse engineering the factory systems in a 2014 Ducati Monster, identifying message structures and making a custom ECU work with the existing systems. We'll look at analysing some wiring, reverse-engineering the CANBUS protocols in use and even pull some data out of the stock ECU to give us a head start on tuning the new shiny.
I'll go through my thought process and how I went from a black-box of sadness and questions through to a running vehicle.