• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

Burned ECU (from shorting it out) Revived

Good find by our Italian friend there. I'm Glad you posted it here as I rarely look on advrider due to the volume of posts and threads (and BS) that move through there.

I owned another bike that was infamous for the ECU crapping out due to contact with the seat pan which would stress the ECU connectors (which in turn cracked the solder joints on the board) as the pan sagged under the riders' weight. Easily fixed by opening the ECU and resoldering those joints, but many people shelled out for new ECUs before that was figured out.
 
isldtime said:
So is that a fuseable link on the pin outs??
Click to expand...

No, I don't think so. If you look at the photo (which isn't clear) and read what he said, I interpret it to mean the connector pin melted and shorted against the adjacent pin. What he did was clear the melted part and put silicone in between to keep the pins apart. I think.......
 
It's a tight spot and a low res pic, but it just looks like the loop on a blade fuse.
It is a great plus, but I still want a working map for my ECU.
 
Yes what has been posted is what I suspected from the the first failure from a momentary short, I could not get my hands on the BMS-E to confirm it. I looked at another here in Oz recently and saw the same loss of earth. I would suggest an external earth strap under one of the bolts holding the BMS-E together to guard against problems
 
Don't we all. The Aussies seem to have a leg up. We are still struggling to get noticed here. This sucks.
 
It sounds like he soldered in a new link. Resealed the ecu lid with silicone. So far the larger injector, brisk plugs, and PCV has cured my bike. No stalls and runs great.
 
I have PM's with the Italian owner who posted the pic's over at Advrider and he may open up the ECU to get some further info and better pic's for us

In the mean time since the problem also affects the G650GS/Sertao owners with the BMS-E I have put together a pdf with the basics and some of the IC info on my web site on the Repairs/Electronic Repairs page, see the BMS-E Info pdf and the IC data zip files

After I had looked at a failed unit here in Sydney and well prior to the pic's being posted Engineerk9 fitted an external earth strap from his BMS-E case to earth to prevent it from happening and as per his post in another thread yesterday he has put enough kms on it with the earth strap fitted to confirm it does not cause any other problems, I will leave it to him to show how he did it
 
That's a great find! Is there anything that should be done to protect the computer from shorting out? Anything others should know to prevent this?
 
I was thinking that I would pull the ECU and coat it with bed liner or plastidip (if they are non-conductive). Most accidents have involved working under the seat and a tool laid on top of the ECU an inadvertently being pushed against the frame and thus ground. Poof.
 
drzcharlie said:
I was thinking that I would pull the ECU and coat it with bed liner or plastidip (if they are non-conductive). Most accidents have involved working under the seat and a tool laid on top of the ECU an inadvertently being pushed against the frame and thus ground. Poof.
Click to expand...

Might have a problem with heat management. I would try a heavy weight plastic baggie first.
 
I don't understand the issue. You're telling me that the exposed metal body of the ECU is not already a ground? The exposed metal body is (+)? This is hard to believe.
 
isldtime said:
Might have a problem with heat management. I would try a heavy weight plastic baggie first.
Click to expand...

That's a fair point. I have been using a plastic food storage container upside down on it since this problem first surfaced a year or so ago. It fits loosely so it gets air circulation.
 
The exposed, conductive metal body of the ECU is NOT grounded.
Be careful. First thing I do after popping the seat off is lay a shop towel over the ECU. Even with the battery disconnected I can't be certain that there isn't something with a capacitance waiting to go off and I'm not interested in finding out... There's been a handful of fried ECU reports from gapping to the frame via an accidental contact with a wrench or similar. Months and $$$ to get a new one paired to your dash/key set.
 
The case of the BMSE is connected to earth, that is normal on all ECU's to protect from EMI

This fault could occur to any of the modern ECU's using the same sockets including Bosch and other brands, a momentary +12v on the case is overloading the current capacity of the earth pin in the socket and blowing away the connection at the back of the socket to the circuit board. The earlier ECU's used larger current capacity pins for power and earth.

Do not coat the ECU, it will reduce cooling to the ECU and a momentary +12v will blow away the coating instantly. EngineerK9 was already trialling an external earth strap to the ECU case well before the pic's of the internals of the ECU appeared at Advrider and the external earth strap is a result of testing done on a faulty BMSE done here in Sydney
 
Thanks, Wayne. That makes so much more sense. To think that any manufacturer would mount the ECU 1/4" away from the frame, when contact would fry it, was hard to believe. Avoiding contact with +12v makes complete sense.

Would installation of a ground strap to the ECU case avoid the frying of the earth pin in the harness if +12v contact is made? Is there a better solution to prevent potential issues?
 
I've cutout the plastic corner of a milk container and screwed it onto the +ve battery terminal using a nylon screw to protect against this problem. Can't remember who first suggested this, may have been glitch_oz.
 
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