BD EHC undressed!

[MogwoprJr]

Good morning, I am an electronic hobbyist and a friend of mine asked me to see what I could do with the broken EHC's. Its taken me a couple of months to get to the point of testing but I'm headed to the BD shop in a few to give it a test.

Here are a couple of pictures of an unpotted EHC.

http://imgur.com/a/G63d8

There were a couple of components damaged from the unpotting procedure and those took a couple of months to identify and acquire. You'll notice that there is no USB cable. I removed that so as to not accidentally ground out and make something more that I have to fix. Oh and I don't have a 3mm blue led so I used a 5mm white to replace it, it looks a little weird, but it works.

So now that I've fixed the damage done by unpotting, I can now put it on a bike to see whats really wrong with it. Hopefully the shop can get me in to test this on a real bike and not on my test bench.

Enjoy! - Travis

 

[Jwooky]

Very interesting. Nice work. I am very interested to see what the major downfall of the part is. If you can at some point, I would like to. See a schematic of all the major components identified. About all I can tell from the pics is the micro, and some drivers.

 

[MogwoprJr]

I don't have any schematics yet, and DCI did not respond to my information requests. That was expected though. Anything I can contribute I'll do it.

The uController is a Silicon Labs C8051F124

I have not found any major AH HAH! component failures, no burnt traces, no fried IC's and all the mechanical connectors tested just fine.

Also I have not tried to dump the any information off of the processor - hopefully DCI did not read protect the data. If anyone has any of the BD software images or firmware, or associated diagnostic hardware they would like to sell or donate I'll take anything I can get

 

[DRBarnhart]

It looks WAY over engineered for its intended use!!! :down:

No wonder there are issues... :angry:

And a question... Is the EHC case used as ground in any way? I've been thinking about rubber mounting my EHC to reduce the amount of vibration it has to deal with but I want to make sure I won't be shooting myself in the foot by doing so.

Thanks for hard work Travis!!

Dennis

 

[Mickeetwo]

Nice work Travis. Keep us updated as you work along.

 

[FST954]

I am also an electronics technician and the PCB shown is a very basic layout the most exotic component on the PCB is the QFP and that too is a basic component I have often thought about doing the same thing as you are doing, if you dont have access to a potting machine let me know we have one at work

 

[MogwoprJr]

There is no ground through the aluminum casing. In fact there's no connection between the case and the PCB's at all, mechanical or electrical. The only thing holding it in there is the potting material. I don't think there would be an issue with supporting the outside structure with rubberized stuff.

There were a couple of soft pads placed at the bottom of the aluminum case between the case and the uController PCB. I would guess they were there for something to rest the PCB on before pouring the potting over the controller. They were foam rubber and would only serve as an insulator.

I'm still working on a way to get it all disassembled without the trouble I went through this last time. It a while to get to this point.

The EHC I have is the 2 connector version and the bike shop only had an 04 with a single 50pin connector. I left my 2-1 converter at home... so I did not get a chance to see if the EHC works. Hopefully tomorrow.

Thanks guys! - Travis

 

[MogwoprJr]

FST954, if I can end up repairing these consistently, I might need re-potting services, Thank you sir!

The boards are really basic, I do think the microcontroller is a bit much though. The potting material did a good job of stabilizing the electronics and under a microscope I could not see any mechanical contact failures like broken solder joints. With the meter I could not find any continuity issues either.

 

[stlmikie]

I have an earlier model your welcome to as well if you want to check it out. It's off an 03 mastiff.

 

[Trainguy]

Yup, There's the problem Right There.:roll:

 

[krkostecki]

Nice work, HogWoprJr. But damn, I didn't realize Dogs were built to fly to Mars and do your homework, too. WTF with all these micro-components...now I know what EHC stands for - Extra Horrific Crap.

 

[FST954]

No problem let me know if you need my services for the potting, at my work I use a piece of equipment called a Mantis for doing visual inspections I have seen many of times that the leads on the QFP's have insufficient solder on them and the leads are not making contact to the PCB that might also something that you want to look at also use a pick and try to lift each lead to make sure it is making contact to the PCB

 

[MogwoprJr]

stlmikie - I may take you up on that, I have a couple more I just picked up at the shop that I'm going to dig into. The more the merrier!

I agree with the overbuilding of the EHC. All the SMD work is still just basic stuff though. The microcontroller itself, I think, is WAY overkill. There are a few NAND gates, some low pass filter modules, filter caps, one interesting high current IC by Hynix that I haven't seen before etc... It looks like the designers spent a lot of time on building a complex module, not a robust module. KISS must have been lost in the design process somewhere.

Tomorrow I'll get back to the shop and see if this thing works or not.

I am interested in acquiring some firmware binaries for these too, does anyone still have some laying around? I know BDM had software available to look at the MCU and maybe someone has a copy of that around somewhere.

Thanks! - Travis

 

[DRBarnhart]

It looks like the designers spent a lot of time on building a complex module, not a robust module. KISS must have been lost in the design process somewhere.

Exactly!!! Most of the time "less is more" when it comes to reliability. It appears BDM was counting on the potting to absorb what the circuit board should have been designed to withstand on its own.

Dennis

 

[BigDogBro1]

Wow, that was alot of effort to expose the circuit boards. It's amazing how much crap they dumped into that EHC to run a motorcycle. A lot of it was created to sense the circuits for diagnostic problems and log data for warranty claims.

Electronics are normally potted or conformal coated to withstand both shock/vibration and the outdoor elements.

If I had the time and ambition I would design a NEW drop-in replacement unit that replicates only the needed control functions and drops the bells and whistle crap for logging and sensing.

I would package it to use the same Positronic connections from the BD harness and give it the similar form factor or slightly larger to support some relays and fuses. It would still have some electronics in it to run the turn signals, 4-way flashers Speedo/tach head, Engine Service LED, EFI low fuel LED and a few others. It would mount in the same place as the current EHC and wouldn't require any bike teardown to install.

There's the challenge....anyone?

 

[pknowles]

Yup, There's the problem Right There.:roll:

That's a lot of stuff in a match box.

 

[Dawgboy]

Very interesting thread. Great work!

 

[MogwoprJr]

If I had the time and ambition I would design a NEW drop-in replacement unit that replicates only the needed control functions and drops the bells and whistle crap for logging and sensing.

There's the challenge....anyone?[/QUOTE]

BigDogBro1 - that has been the goal of this project from the start

 

[Five Five]

If I had the time and ambition I would design a NEW drop-in replacement unit that replicates only the needed control functions and drops the bells and whistle crap for logging and sensing.

There's the challenge....anyone?

very interesting Travis and nice work .... i will be following this thread

 

[woodbutcher]

ain't tryin' to push you or nothin', but there's a lot of us out here still runnin' the original EHC and it sure would be nice to know there was a plug-n-play ready and waitin' if it ever goes down. of course, if it lasts forever, you would have a limited market seein' as how there's a limited number of dogs on the road. but if it was that good, it might be attractive to folks that are building their own bikes to use that want a little more than bare bones basics.