Year: 2019

While heavily a Work in Progress, Bob has started to put together some decent documentation on the dongle. It’s in the Wiki section of the firmware on gitlab. Have a peek and maybe you want to go on an order spree.

On the hardware side, as you probably have noticed we’ve progressed from the breadboard to veroboard-and-hot-glued in an OBD2 dongle enclosure. At least our builds are now a bit wife-friendly 😉

On the software side we’re working on a few features such as direct access to the Multimedia CANbus that Bob mentioned in the previous post, It will open up a few possibilities you will really like (more on that later). Also, we’re working on making the thing a bit more secure, but also more friendly for the non-technical user.

And then there is the ton of other things small and large. To name just a few:
– some things need to be slightly changed in CanZE now that is fed with data so much faster
– a setting screen in CanZE for this device
– low level technical stuff to make more things possible

For the techies: implementing sending multi-frame ISO-TP messages is needed. It required a lot of testing and coding and what not. This is how my desk looks around midnight. CANbus sniffer (Arduino DUE with GVRET) under USB control, T-cable with custom RJ-45 pinout, RJ45 splitter, RJ45 coupler with a CAN termination resistor tucked inside, RJ45 power insert contraption with lots of hot glue, the DIY Dongle being monitored over USB ……..

Is anyone experienced in moving this sort of home grown garage build stuff to the level of a decent and efficient PCB design without using a development board, a production run and maybe even fulfillment?

My current development dongle already looks somewhat clearer, now that it got it’s case, but under the hood, there is still room for improvement.

The second transceiver has recently be added, still it is not being used right now. So the hardware is present and software development is “under construction”.

Here is an example on how I build my dongle prototype. Note that this is not fitted in a real dongle case. It’s slightly too big for it and at the moment this my only ESP32 board and I want it removable. Also, I do like the RJ45 connectors (see this post) I use to hook up to the ZOE’s different CAN buses. In a follow up post I’ll show a more neatly “dongle-ized” evolution, with added LEDs, and maybe even able to access that second CANbus without any replugging.

The development board is plugged into two pin headers. When removed it reveals the DC-DC converter set to about 5.5 volt and the CANbus transceiver.

The software consists of a few functional parts.

First, there is the CANbus library. While the ESP32 is around for a while now and there is good CAN support in Espressif’s IDF, the support in the Arduino environment is mediocre at best. For instance, the receiving is implemented using proper FreeRtos queues, but sending a frame is totally unbuffered and without any success/failure feedback. Still, it works.

Then there is a simple I/O system that handles communication on basically a character by character basis to and from the Serial-over-USB, Bluetooth and Wifi (basically a socket connection over TCP/IP, and a local access point). While it takes some tinkering to get the WiFi sockets play nicely, all this stuff is very well supported in the ESP32 tool chain for Arduino. A simple command interpreter handles the commands. The language used is called BobDue for historical reasons.

Free frames on the bus are simply received, stored in an array with one element for each ID. When a frame is requested, the latest value is simply pulled from the array. Note that all this traffic is very volatile and it serves no purpose whatsoever to do complex queuing for any other reason than keeping up with the data speed.

ISO-TP frames are decoded and buffered, but only if they match up with the requested ID. Flow control is handled as is message assembly. We don’t support multi-package frame sending yet. Edit: we now fully support long message sending!

The main loop checks if there is a new frame on the queue and if so, having it processed. Then it checks for new characters from the I/O subsystem. Finally it calls a few ticker functions to send out queued ISO-TP frames and other housekeeping tasks, such as aging the free frame array.

The entire source is reasonably commented C code, and can be found on https://gitlab.com/jeroenmeijer/cansee. Just load the source into PlatformIO, select the board, and upload. This is all a work in progress and at this moment your best bet is the development branch. As soon things settle a bit, we will start doing decent releases with pre-compiled binaries attached.

While developing, tons of new ideas are popping up. Will talk about those later.