The Story of the RP Precision™ Engine Management System (EMS)

We have spent countless hours in our engine dyno facility as well as testing over the road to perfect, what we believe to be, the ultimate adaptive learning based engine management system available on the market today.

Everyone from the owner of a stock bike to a full blown, fire breathing 131” engine will benefit from this product. Driveability-Perfect. Power delivery-Perfect. Fuel economy-Perfect. Throttle response-Perfect. The list goes on and on. What make us different is that we are the only company to offer a system that fully integrates with and utilizes the refinement and power of the OEM ECU. All the issues of trying to couple a passive system to the ECU and “fool” it are a thing of the past. Also a thing of the past is the phrase “The more you ride it, the better it gets.” No multiple downloads to get the base tune closer to the proper “learning range”. All these are gone because when you install it, you drive away and it works.

How it Works

Some companies tend to throw around terms like AFR, Stoich, Alpha-N, and MAP load like they are key words that everyone who rides knows what they are or, honestly, cares about. 99.9% of riders just want their bike, regardless of modification, to do a few things: Be reliable, get good fuel economy, be fun to ride and they want it to happen right now. It is awesome to have the ability to open up a laptop computer and data-log and to make parameter changes and so on, but unless you are a tuning shop why would you really want to? The basic physics of an engine dictates that it wants certain ranges of air/fuel ratios and certain timing parameters and they want these numbers to happen consistently at all load and temperature ranges. The Precision system takes these factors into account and adjusts for them instantaneously. Not a little better each time you ride. Not only at certain throttle positions. Instantly. The reason this can be accomplished is because the Precision unit properly utilizes the correct Mass Air Transfer Function based on engine load to control air/fuel the way it was designed from the factory. Like the other systems, the Precision also utilizes wide band O2 sensors to constantly feed information to the main ECU where corrections can be made. You might ask, “Well, isn’t that what the rest of them do?” Well, yes and no. Most of the current auto-tuning systems rely heavily upon Alpha-N technology. This is okay, but the problem with it is that, being throttle position based, you can have over 2000 individual fuel cells that have to be populated and/or “learned”. More is better right? Wrong. The factory didn’t design it that way because it is incredibly cumbersome and takes the greater part of forever to get it right because you have to “hit” every one of those cells with regards to throttle position to allow the ECU to correct. Some cells have to be populated more than once depending upon how close the air/fuel is on a percentage basis of where it should have been in the first place. The Precision system only uses Alpha-N and throttle position as a fuel modifier to the appropriate mass air flow (MAF) curve. The Precision system is simply unmatched in the industry. Another instance of how the Precision unit is unique is that by using the tried and tested factory ECU methods and parameters you do not have to sacrifice the factory knock sensing capabilities that can protect your engine. Proper spark control is actually not as hard to grasp as some companies might have you believe. If you were to take the spark maps from the top ten tuners in the country right now you would find that they vary only by a couple degrees. I know what you are going to say and yes, two degrees can mean a great deal on a brittle, high end motor. The point is that if you do not take load and engine temperature into account when you develop a timing map even the most simplistic of builds can rattle. Think about this. The only time you hear an engine detonate is when the engine is under load. The factory knows this and it is why they instituted the ion-sensing knock protection across the plug gap in the first place. Why in the world would you want to get rid of it? With the RP Precision EMS system you don’t have to and you are able to take full advantage of the benefits of integrating engine timing with engine load demands without the tendency to spark knock that competitive systems struggle with.

The Process

When our team was designing the RP Precision EMS system we took all aspects of the systems currently available into account. First and foremost were effectiveness and execution as well as speed of the auto tuning capabilities. Next was the overall ease of use for the dealerships, independent shops and, ultimately, end users. With regards to effectiveness we found that a couple of the systems actually functioned pretty well. But, there is always a “but”, most if not all, rely almost exclusively on Alpha-N like we discussed before. Again, the biggest drawback is the time that it takes to hit thousands of individual cells for the equipment to learn and adjust. The second issue is that with the other systems you are required “ride and record”. In other words, you have to ride the bike and then the data has to be saved to the module using a laptop computer or, at the very least, the bike has to be powered on and off several times. None of this occurs with the Precision system. You simply order your kit, install the oxygen sensors and controller, and when your ECU returns you plug it in, follow the initial start-up procedure and go ride. What could be easier? Nothing!