KNOW YOUR… ECU FLASHING!
With electronic tuning being more common than ever, we checked in with Geoff Whale at Hilltop ECU to see howflashing ECUs can make your bike faster, cleaner and better.
WORDS: PRETTY BOY
If you see a man with this kind of suit case, he’s probably a flasher.
PICS: S PEEDYCOM / FB ARCHIVE
Tech talk
FB: What do ECUs do?
GW: The ECU is essentially the brain of the bike! It’s a complex computerised system which controls everything to do with the engine management, from how much fuel the engine gets when the engine sparks to literally everything to do with the running of the engine electronically.
FB: What does the term flashing actually mean?
GW: Okay, are you ready? The term flashing is a very old term which was used many years ago when early ECUs had an EPROM, or erasable programmable read only memory, which is an early type of flash memory chip that retains its data after the power supply is turned off or terminated meaning it’s a non-volatile memory. An EPROM is an array of floating-gate transistors which are individually programmed by an electronic device which supplies higher voltages than those that are generally used in digital circuits.