CAN-bus communication

[jelco]

I have gotten my hands on a cluster from a MY09 911 Carrera, fully functional and everything. In a perhaps somewhat overly ambitious move I decided it'd be a good idea to mount the cluster on my Fanatec wheel to turn it way more Porsche than it already is. There is a very important problem: it's from a rather modern car, and hence uses the CAN bus for most of its gauges and lights. Interestingly several gauges relating to oil and fuel level are analog inputs, but the tacho, speedo and a ton of other features is only available through digital communication.

There's several devices on the market for communicating with a CAN bus, the cheapest being this one. I personally wouldn't mind putting in a couple of hours of coding to get SimDash to communicate with this thing, but considering it's not open-source software that's going to be a tad bit difficult.

Is there any chance of a plugin getting developed for this purpose, or some kind of basis for me to code the plugin with? I can't promise you it's going to be finished anytime fast if I have to do it myself, but if only for the awesome factor I'd definitely want to finish it if I got the chance.

Jelco

[Cristiano]

Hi.
Before thinking about the software I would investigate if that device will actually work with your dashboard. I don't think it will be very easy to make them speak each other. Do you have any documentation on the protocol used by the dashboard?  I mean low level details of the commands the dashboard expects.

Cheers
Cristiano

[jelco]

I've got the official Porsche documentation for this one (which is also how I got the pin-out for the dashboard) so I'll find my way around. No exact list of commands but there's quite some hints to find my way around. Besides, CAN is a standardised protocol used in many cars (see also here) so combined with the built-in functionality of the device in question I wouldn't worry too much.

That being said, there's always need for testing of course, but let's just say I have confidence it will work.

Jelco

[BjornSP]

Ambitieus project  .

But I think the few hours of coding you what to put in it wont be enough.

Problems I think you will run in to:

- You don't know the exact message the car gives to the gauges cluster. Porsche will never release these messages/code. These are not standaard messages, only the protocol is standaard.
- You don't know how many times the message is send, 1 time or 10000 times per millisecond???
- The cluster will probably have some security protection on it. The chip in the carkey needs to match the security protection in the cluster, otherwise nothing works.

There are ways to get a hold on the first two problems, but there costly, not 100% and you need the car.
http://www.peak-system.com/Home.59.0.html?&L=1
http://katho.caneye.be/pagina.aspx?id=1