Follow this link to a whole new section dedicated to the V2 

I have decided to start pouring out some of the knowledge I have picked up over the years and for no other reason than ‘its good to share’
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So as the whim takes I will be adding stuff on these pages and maybe some of it will be interesting or even useful.

This is the first entry.

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​Last year I spent a heap of time trying to figure out how to get rid of the ABS pump on the new Ducati V4, this was a spin off project while I was doing the same thing for the older 1199, 959 and 899.

The hardware wasn’t a problem as we already have a generic control board that can capture the wheel speed signals and then route them back over the CAN line. Easy, or at least it should be.
The first stages went pretty smoothly, just hacking CAN stuff and running the whole bike on a front and rear wheel speed simulator to get the system to react.

But like all CAN hacking the easy stuff is very easy, and the hard stuff can be seriously hard as there are so many bit flags, uneven channel alignments and just random stuff that seems to happen and no real way to truly understand what they all are, or what is important.

So after hundreds of hours and lots of riding with a data logger it eventually became apparent that we would never actually do this and still keep an element of safety.

The electronics package on the V4 is very clever and not all of it is inside the ECU. It works something like this.

- The ECU controls the throttles (no big surprise there), and probably has built in torque mapping for each gear

- The IMU (inertial platform) sends raw data about the bike movements to the ABS pump.

- The ABS pump also gets the wheel speed data, adds this to the IMU data, adds a bit more from the rider modes, more still from the brake pressures, stirs it all up with some fancy calculations and then spits out throttle (torque) corrections to the ECU both for acceleration and braking.

​So to make a product that does all this would pretty much mean we are re-inventing all the work Bosch has done over the years and Ducati during their testing. And I’m not going down that road.

This stunning Pierobon X80R was built by Boulder Motor Sports in Colorado and based on a tuned 848 motor, and is the very first one in the USA.

Our contribution was a full set of Marelli electronics including the MDU220 dashboard, SRT ECU, our own Ride By Wire system and a heap of other techno toys. The bike started first time and ran through the first track test at Miller problem free.