The project

I've been looking for a new travel bike for my next longer ride for a bit. In the past I've used a few different setups.




This was the first Honda 250 XR I did Thailand, Laos and Cambodia with. Great lightweight bike despite quite basic luggage system for the first 7000 km. Not much went wrong on this one except for a flat battery and a broken brake lever after my very first crash.


I spent a year on the KTM 640 Adventure all over South and Central America which ended up being about 45000km. Very good bike for a bit longer distance and just about the right size for long distance adventure without being too heavy do do some off-roading with.


I spent about 25000km around Europe on this KTM 990 Adventure. Smoother and classier than the 640 but too heavy for me to take off-road and hence I didn't even drop it once during 4 years of usage.


This is the new project! It is a 2014 KTM 690 Enduro R. Not much of a travel bike yet and here I just broken the plastic hand guards and rear brake lever while doing some early enduro test riding with it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nav Tower

Image
  Getting lost in exotic countries can sometimes be fun but can also be dangerous in case you don't get to where you need to in time. For the upcoming trip next year the navigation system, or nav tower for short, is built on top of the Rally Raid front tower. First off some prototyping was needed: Then a first rough acrylic glass prototype was made: Initially I thought about laser cutting a aluminum metal plate. However, the makerspace with the laser cutters in Hong Kong only cut carbon and stainless steel so instead decided to go with a bit thicker acrylic glass (4mm) compared to the prototype (3mm). The idea behind the setup is to have redundant instrumentation for all critical systems much like in an airplane cockpit . The key instrumentations are: Navigation Primary: Carpe Iter Backup: Mobile phone Speed Primary: Bike standard instrument Backup: Carpe Iter Distance Primary: Bike instrument Backup: Carpe Iter Fuel Primary: Bike instrumentation Backup: Open tank and look Electri
Read more

Getting stuck in New Territories

Image
Last Sunday the weather was great and I hadnt been out riding for a while so thought I would head out for a ride. Not having ridden for a few weeks I noted the battery had gone flat. I took it out and put it on charge for an hour while having breakfast. Normally I charge it longer but I was keen on getting out on the road and while riding the bike the battery is getting charged so didn't worry to much of having a flat battery. I was just coming over the mountain range on Route Twisk, where plenty of sport bikes go racing, when I noticed I was low on fuel. I pulled into a gas station and filled the bike up. Once I was ready to go I turned the ignition back on but nothing happened when I pushed the start button. Since the light came on and the headlight looked fine it wasn't obvious what was wrong. The most obvious sign was that the service light was showing after a few seconds when turning the ignition on. I thought maybe the ECU, the bikes computer, had gone wrong so
Read more

Trying out the bluetooth OBD connector

Image
I want to connect my laptop to my bike in order to both get diagnostic info out as well as hook up new toys to it. The most promising way to do this sounds like the OBD2 diagnostics interface. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be easy to do on bikes from 2014 or later having the "Fly by Wire" throttle. In the past I've happily connected my KTM 990 Adventure to TuneECU but the 2014 690 Enduro R is not playing a long as easily. So far I've tried out the Lonelec cable and USB cable to laptop Konnwei KW902 Bluetooth dongle Vgate Scan OBD Bluetooth dongle Only the Vgate dongle is responding but is not talking to TuneECU. However connecting with a serial comm terminal like Tera Term then it responds to the basic ELM commands. I also wrote a small diagnostic Python program based on python-OBD to try to see what was supported: import obd obd.logger.setLevel(obd.logging.DEBUG) # enables all debug information ports = obd.scan_serial() print (ports) connec
Read more