Category: Hardware

I have added two user submitted designs for actually building a CanSee device to the repository. They can be found in the doc folder of the repository. We love to see these builds!

While working on the ZE50, we found a silly bug in the CanSee firmware. If…

• you have a ZE50
• you build a CanSee dongle
• you want to be on the bleeding edge on the CanZE beta’s

… please update the firmware as soon as possible. You can find it here.

The CanSee dongle firmware has been updated to handle 29 bit requests properly. This version (004) is required if you intent to use CanSee with the new ZE50, please update the firmware. If you have modified the software you need to merge the changes. If you do not intent to use your CanSee dongle with a ZE50, there is no need to update.

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.

Göran Nybom reported on the issue tracker that the Vgate iCar 3 ELM327, which at least seems not to be some no-brand-with-always-changing-guts dongle, works fine. Price seems fair (20-ish), and it’s smaller than the KONNWEI which people might like.

This is no endorsement, we don’t have one, but if you do, please comment with your results, so we can update the hardware page. Or send it to me 😉

Edit: unfortunately, the one I received did not support the ATAL command and contained a main controller with a scraped off top marking. So unfortunately, I cannot honestly recommend buying Vgate, at least not from Aliexpress or Ebay. it seems that these are carbon-copied too. Well, the shell at least.

Before you read on: this post in not an endorsement whatsoever. We stick 100% to our advice to either build a CanSee dongle if you want fast&furious, or buy a KONNWEI 902, as that is about the only dongle that is a fairly stable build for fairly cheap.

Having said that, as a sort of fun/silly experiment stemming from the “Use ISOTP fields” mode I wrote about earlier, I decided to order the absolute cheapest dongle I could get, and ended up with a usual “blue transparent case” model for under 2 Euros.

Guess what, it has a decent PIC processor, external EEPROM, Bluetooth 4.0 chip, and an Atmel (Microchip) CANbus transceiver. This is not some hacked together crappy thing with half baked software in the spare capacity of some Bluetooth controller. And here comes the unbelievable part. After some tweaking, I got it running with CanZE. I literally had to change two lines of code in the development branch. Which I will have to cross check with my KONNWEI dongle of course. I was honestly flabbergasted.

Although the last picture of Raplh’s Zoe Plugin has a make-like flair, he didn’t stop there and even installed some led indicators using a NeoPixel strip.

Thanks to Ralph for sending me pictures of his Zoe plugin, which is basically a CanSee dongle that exactly fit’s into the car. But take a look at the pictures yourself.

The second print (blue) is finally usable, but I refined it to make it fit more neatly. The third print (orange) is the last one I did today and the components of my previous prototype fit perfectly.

The print may not look perfect, but hey, is quite a step above the “duck tape version”, isn’t it?

The first case doesn’t fit 100% – as usual – so I’ve made some improvements before launching the next print. 😉