Voiding the Warranty: Modding my Motorbike
Robin Hodgson
Talk Track Two
My journey of discovery while modding my motorbike’s ECU will be covered. Along the way, the ECU’s EPROM was replaced with a circuit board containing a Flash memory for code storage, a GPS module, and a secondary ARM processor. The code inside the ECU was modified to emit a real-time data stream of the ECU/sensor information where the secondary processor would combine it with GPS position and velocity data. It was all for fun, and it was a lot of fun along the way.
Years later, the introduction of the Raspberry Pi RP2040 processor meant that I could finally redesign the original hardware to operate as I had always wanted it to, plus add a bunch of new features.
The presentation will touch on a variety of topics:
- Reverse engineering
- Value of hardware proof-of-concepts
- Assembly language coding for speed
- Zero-overhead software timing via cycle counting
The presentation is intended to be accessible to people who have not encountered such topics before but might want to get an introduction.