Dongle testing (more geek talk)

You might want to have a peek at this “Frankenstein contraption” testing rig. Things have moved on since (more on that in a later post), but this is how projects like this start. Note that I laid it out neatly on my desk. Real life testing is often a lot messier, often smacking all of this, plus a power bank, plus my laptop, plus my phone in my car!

I do all CANbus connections using RJ45 connectors with a specific pin layout. On the breadboard is the ESP32 development board, powered, flashed and debugged through it’s USB cable. I use PlatformIO on top of Atom on Ubuntu, after having recently switched from the Arduino IDE. The dev board is slightly development unfriendly in that it leaves no pin row on one side. Luckily, that side only needs Vcc, so a small green wire pops out under the board.

On the left side is the 3.3 volt CANbus transceiver. powered from the dev board. From here, a short grey cable carries the CANbus. The T in the middle connects the bus components. On the right a short wire to the SAE J1962 plug going to the car, and on the left is my good old GVRET device based on an Arduino Due and the accompanying SavvyCAN desktop software to spy on the bus and see what is going on. This proved invaluable again. At first the wrong bus resistors made the controller refuse sending packets. Later on it confirmed the car computers did fine answering, but there was a bug in the firmware interpreting that.

The silver block is just a connector, but when this is not connected to the car, I can replace it with an identical block with a 60 ohm resistor over the bus terminals to create an independent CANbus-on-my-desk. Note that to test a CANbus device such as the ESP32, you not only need that bus termination resistor, but also at least one other device to set the acknowledge bit of each frame transmitted by your device under test.