Flashing ECU

[Abu_Mishary]

Hey guys... While currently waiting for my bike for repairs, I think I have decided to add a few upgrades onto my bike.. However, due to the currency difference and the insane excise imposed on 250cc and above for accessories imported from oversea (it is considered as "luxury items". Taxes imposed are from 30% up to 100%).. So my first step is to flash ECU. Current speed recorded (as stated on odometer) was 170 km/h and RPM was 13.5K and the bike could not go any faster than that. Was thinking to flash the OEM ECU and was told that the bike could perform better and to add in HM Quickshifter.

Anyone done flashing their ECUs before? Any heads up on what to expect after doing that? Is it better to have a fuel controller unit rather than flashing the ECU?

[InvisiBill]

All the US EX250s are carbed, so they don't have ECUs. There's probably not going to be a ton of experience with that here...

An ECU is just a computer that tells the engine what to do. As long as the stock ECU is physically able to do what you want (the one in my truck can't support certain injectors without modding, for example), you can put the exact same programming into it that you have in an aftermarket ECU. Regardless of the computer's details, if it sends the same commands to the engine, the engine is going to behave exactly the same.

However, aftermarket ECUs are generally much more friendly to being reprogrammed. They're made for people to adjust them, and to support mods. They may have support for more fine-grained programming. The OEM ECU is designed to hold the factory programming, with a little bit of support for changing the programming by the manufacturer to address issues with the stock bike. If you can get your desired programming flashed into the stock ECU, it'll be fine. If you need finer control, extra features, or want to tweak your tuning, you'll probably need to switch to aftermarket.

Flashing an ECU is sort of like burning CDs. There's some technical knowledge involved in actually doing the process. But as the end-user, you're probably a lot more concerned about which songs were chosen to be burned onto the CD rather than which brand of burner was used to make the CD. The details of the program being put into the ECU are a lot more important to how your bike runs than which brand of ECU is holding the program. (But different brands of ECU may make it easier to get a good program running on your bike.)