I thought dongles could not be further cost-optimized. Well, I was wrong. I ordered this as case / connector donor for a CanSee dongle. No screws, no wiring, blob processor. It cost me EUR 2.81 delivered, less than an empty shell. It didn’t work for CanZe of course.
A friend of mine received his ZE50 last week. Only a few days later we had a successful “CANbus sniffer session”. As I indicated in another post it seems the E-bus of the car, which in the past was wired directly to the OBD2 (SAE-J1962) connector, is now firewalled. And indeed, in the list of ECU’s of the ZE50 there is what is called a “Secure Gateway”.
First indications are the gateway needs to be mildly coaxed into letting us through, but for non-evasive stuff like CanZE does, there is no cryptographic authentication involved.
There are a LOT of new boxes in the ZE50. Some have 11 bit addresses, some 29 bits, and some seem to be able to use both. Let’s call that “interesting”.
So where are we now? Well, we have a few reasonable assumptions now. At the moment, I am making minor changes to the CanSee dongle so it supports 29 bits addressing and it’s internal table of ECU’s contains the new boxes. That is reasonably straightforward and almost done.
Next, I will add a simple screen to the experimental section of CanZE and see if we can make that work flawlessly. Just a few fields. To test that it will require another round trip to my buddy who will kindly let me plug in my gear into his car. This is a crucial step. If this goes as expected, the remainder is just work.
We need to upgrade the driver for the ELM dongles to enable 29 bit mode, and finally we need to go over each and every field to see if we can use the old definitions or need to adjust.
So, there is a plan now, there is decent logging data, and fairly good field definitions. But first I need to get rid of the flu 🙁
