ECU Reflash

Marcoma said:

Is the Magneti Marelli system EPROM based like in the past?

If so, you can get piggy-back systems (ROMSWAP) that will carry switchable maps. Downside is you have to access the ROM in the ECU and that means breaking the security seal - so the dealer will know its been tampered with....

Remapping should hopefully cure the peakiness of the current setup. Does anyone know if Ducati plans to reflash existing models?

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TheFrog said:

The ECU isn't hard to crack. My guys did it in two days (in between real work) and they don't even know that it's used to control an engine (ok, i told them).

It's much better than previous ones but the programming is much more complex. Quite similar to what Ferrari uses.

The up-map key doesn't hold a map the it uploads to the ECU, it holds a digital key that unlocks a map bundle that was already stored. The dealer can upload updates to these map bundles.

There are three map bundles stored from stock. One for each exhaust that Ducati provides.
Each map bundle contains three engine maps, 120, 195 lo and 195 hi.
Each engine map contains twelve cylinder maps, one for each cylinder for each gear. Plus: throttle ratio and EBC.

I'm sure you can imagine how overwhelming this can look to someone who's oly been dealing with simple maps all their lives. I've built many race car engines with complex mapping (turbo) and have spoken with people who tune this kind of ECU, let me tell you that it's a lot more work IF YOU INTEND TO DO IT WELL and not cut corners. Some will cut corners and be satisfied with the results because it can be tuned as simply as the old method but that's just up to the end user to decide what level of expertise they want.

Since the ECU is made to accept map updates, there is a way to communicate with it without having to image (reflash) it. That would look like the dealer did it. The only thing we haven't found yet is how the dealer's workstation identifies itself so that could be cloned and therefore hide that someone else did it. I'm trying to vulgarize here to minimize the hacker talk.

Disclaimer: We will not develop maps for this, or any other ECU. We are an IT Security firm and we test systems, nothing more.

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