So there's now a collection of very nice Ducati parts sitting in my garage, loosely assembled in the shape of a 749R.
That's probably a little harsh but not too far from the truth, there was still a fair bit to do before it was ready to be ridden in anger...or ridden at all for that matter. Nothing major, just that last 5% of a build, the niggly jobs that take up far more time than you think they will.
It's about this time I started realising that when people talk about Ducati's being "special", they are probably referring to the tooling required...lots and lots of "special" tools! I'd made stuff in the past to hold clutch hubs etc but the purchase of a basic Ducati maintenence set made things soooo much easier. Sure you can just stomp on the brake lever while the bike is in gear and pneumatically rattle up the clutch hub nut, but the ease of use and peace of mind that comes from knowing the hub nut (for example) actually is torqued to 190Nm using the simple holder tool and decent torque wrench is well worth the one off expense. Sermon over....
And then there was getting acquainted with the Nemesis ECU and Digitek Falcon dash.
This is where Ducati took a step into the future, being (I think) the first to employ CAN-Bus communication/wiring protocol on it's 999/749 models.
So what is CAN-Bus? Basically, ECU's do the hard work via digital comm's rather than having discrete wires for every single signal: you have complex comm's sent over a simple harness rather than simple signals sent over a complex harness, so the wiring harness is lighter, simpler and cheaper. The dash is no longer a "dumb" display, it is a secondary ECU, able to access all the information in the main ECU, and has the ability to store/log information, change configuration, choose what information you want to display or parameter you want to change.
Now not much of this functionality is used on the stock 749/999 dash, seen below, although some inputs do go via the dash which the ECU is able to access via the (you guessed it) CAN-Bus:
But the Digitek Falcon, as fitted to my 749R and Troy Bayliss' WSB championship winning 999F06 below (no, there won't be a prize for guessing which is which) and most Ducati RS bikes of the era, takes things to a different level:
So what does it do for us?
1. Individual display configurations for Race, Warm up and Practice
2. Stores up to 40 lap times
3. Minimum corner speed is latched
4. Maximum speed is latched
5. Maximum RPM is latched
6. 3 x configurable shift lights plus over rev warning
7. Gear display with programmable gear/rpm ratio
Plus the usual engine vital signs/warnings
Nothing too radical these days but back in the early-mid 2000's this was NASA stuff.
Now tie this in with the fully accessible/programmable Nemesis ECU and you start to get the kind of plug and play functionality that was previously unheard of:
- Rather than the stand-alone laptimers of old you could simply buy the kit, fit the sensor to the bike, plant your beacon trackside and away you go, laptimes instantly displayed and stored on the dash.
- Same for the quickshifter: simply fit the sensor to the shift rod (or go with a GP-shift lever with integrated sensor), plug it in and there you have full throttle upshifts, with configurable cut-times at the click of a mouse.
- There is full auto-tune capability with the available Lambda kit allowing each cylinder to be mapped individually,
- 2 maps stored in the ECU (think "wet" or "dry" maps), selectable on the fly
- Pit lane limiter
- Change between metric and imperial units of measure
- Change tyre circumference for accurate speed measurement
And heaps more...
So it's pretty powerful stuff, allowing access to ECU functions in a way that hadn't really been seen at "Average Joe" level before
And it just tickles me that all this EFI/CAN-Bus technology which Ducati helped pioneer is applied to what is basically a tarted up Pantah from the '70's. Only in Italy.....
