Universal electrics for old cars

[Bowie69]

As long as you don't start putting main beam and indicators switches on a touch screen I'm sure we'll still get along

 

[Peaklander]

Please keep posting your ideas. There will be many lurkers on here; I certainly am. The only way you will know is through a few 'likes'!

[elbekko]

It's an interesting idea, and I'm following with interest. Not much to add otherwise.

I've long been a proponent of modular CAN systems in cars, the biggest problem is that they're very closed systems and hard to debug sometimes.

So as a piece of advice: provide very good logging, and a thorough diagnostic interface.

[FridgeFreezer]

It's an interesting idea but I'm with Bowie on this - I don't see how all this effort is better or more robust or easier to fix/diagnose/repair in the field than just having a small bundle of wires running along the truck that any fool can sort out.

And I say that as someone who does this as a day job and built my own digital dashboard for my 109 - but it's all made to work with what's effectively a standard loom and would not affect the working of the vehicle if the electronics died.

[Sigi_H]

9 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:

and would not affect the working of the vehicle if the electronics died

Thats one of the goals. Exchangement of all components is very easy and cheap. In most cases you dont even to have to go home for that. Power boxes front and rear are identical. A dead Arduino is the biggest problem, but can it be purchased from the beginning for 80€. One can allways have a spare part, but experience shows ... its only for calming.

But as I said, I can understand the fear of people who are not into that. It doesnt help to explain, why it can be a lot harder to find cable problems in a harness. Once I had a motorbike which sporadicaly stopped in left hand corners. It took me weeks to find broken copper inside the insulation of a cable close to the steering head of the chassis. Micromovements has been the reason. They opened and closed a circuit.

 

[FridgeFreezer]

80 euros for a microcontroller is madness IMHO, there's STM32's out there under a fiver that run rings around an Ardunio. Even the old F103 bluepill boards. Or pick one that runs micropython natively if you want ease of coding.

80 euro buys a lot of wiring harness.

Not sure how reducing the total number of wires in the harness automatically makes it more reliable - cables can still get damaged and instead of one thing being affected one entire end of the vehicle could start acting weird. Plus you still need a big power feed wire to run it all.

[Sigi_H]

7 minutes ago, FridgeFreezer said:

80 euros for a microcontroller is madness IMHO, there's STM32's out there under a fiver that run rings around an Ardunio.

Yes, but without PCB, without sockets,power supply, without Quarz and everything. Wrong comparison. I want to avoid building a own PCB.

Reliability can ofcourse be achieved with cables, but not really with the autospark harnesses. The copper lines inside the insulation are less than original. These cables are very cheap. I bought the harness for the trailer socket.

Please dont missunderstand. I dont want to convince anybody. For me this is a nice project with benefits and I hoped it will be for others as well.

One big advantage of the arduino is, that it needs no time for booting. Put power on it and its ready.

 

[Bowie69]

If you are happy with Arduino, have a look at ESP32, way more capable out the box, more IO and many more DA. 

WiFi, BT all built in the dev board. 

[Snagger]

8 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:

80 euros for a microcontroller is madness IMHO, there's STM32's out there under a fiver that run rings around an Ardunio. Even the old F103 bluepill boards. Or pick one that runs micropython natively if you want ease of coding.

80 euro buys a lot of wiring harness.

Not sure how reducing the total number of wires in the harness automatically makes it more reliable - cables can still get damaged and instead of one thing being affected one entire end of the vehicle could start acting weird. Plus you still need a big power feed wire to run it all.

Careful, John, you’re starting to think like me! 😜😂

[elbekko]

12 hours ago, Bowie69 said:

ESP32

Ooh, I like this: https://www.nanoframework.net/

For some reason the hardware side of electronics has always slightly eluded me. I get the concepts, but don't ask me to design a complex circuit, for some reason... even though I'd love to, I have many, many ideas on how to improve the P38 with some custom electronics 😛

[Bowie69]

For inputs or...? 

If you can make a voltage divider and understand pull up/down resistors you are 90% of the way there. 

You can use the Arduino IDE for ESP32, as I understand it, the Code setup can't be time consuming, but may be worth it when I get a roundtuit. 

[elbekko]

52 minutes ago, Bowie69 said:

For inputs or...? 

If you can make a voltage divider and understand pull up/down resistors you are 90% of the way there. 

Inputs and outputs, yeah. As said, I understand the general concepts, just struggle with gluing it all together, really. I should just properly read up on it, can't be all that difficult. My classes of analog and digital electronics are a long time ago, and even then I understood the concepts fine, but never did proper design of a circuit from scratch.

54 minutes ago, Bowie69 said:

You can use the Arduino IDE for ESP32, as I understand it, the Code setup can't be time consuming, but may be worth it when I get a roundtuit. 

What I linked is appealing for me as a C#.NET developer One less hurdle to learn new syntax and a new IDE.

[Bowie69]

Even in Arduino IDE it is C, but appreciate if you know the IDE then will likely take you no time at all to get up and running

 

[FridgeFreezer]

18 hours ago, Sigi_H said:

Yes, but without PCB, without sockets,power supply, without Quarz and everything. Wrong comparison. I want to avoid building a own PCB.

If you don't build a PCB how are you going to robustly & neatly connect everything to an arduino? Did I miss something?

18 hours ago, Sigi_H said:

One big advantage of the arduino is, that it needs no time for booting. Put power on it and its ready.

That's every microcontroller ever though - it's only SoC's like Raspberry Pi that need boot time.

[Sigi_H]

You miss nothing. I hope to find some kind of breakout board which provides screwing terminals for the IO Pins of the arduino, which is pluged on it.

I know, that all controller boards dont need booting. The PI is a complete Linux Computer. This is why I will not use it, even though it is a lot more capable.

I`m allways open to better boards. The Arduino seemed to me to be the best solution to be bought everywhere and as well to learn and operate quickly for people who are not so much in electronics and programming. The entire concept is exactly made for that. Even beginners will have success soon.

[Tobias]

I like the idea. Not sure I would actually implement it, the way you showed in the diagrams, but for all auxiliary electrics...

Extra lights, font sides rear

compressor

this

that

the other

 

T

[Bowie69]

I guess an awful lot of this can be achieved using a PDM these days, one at each end of the vehicle and CAN between them, centralised configuration point. 

In fact I can't see anything that has been suggested couldn't be done that way, they are essentially microcontroller, but have all the thinking done for you by someone with loads of experience. 

[Sigi_H]

PDMs are nice, but hard to get in Kazachstan 😄

All of the parts I`d like to use are cheap to hold as spare part and the kind of used relays are interchangeable

On the other hand PDMs are again a black box, where nobody knows, whats hapens inside.

https://www.shopasmotorsports.com/pdms

[elbekko]

On 12/10/2023 at 7:43 PM, Bowie69 said:

If you are happy with Arduino, have a look at ESP32, way more capable out the box, more IO and many more DA. 

WiFi, BT all built in the dev board. 

Now look at what you made me do!

(And since it came with a broken button, the shop is sending a second one as well )

[Bowie69]

Nice!

 

[Sigi_H]

I am not familiar with ESP32.

Are there enough I/O? Do not forget all (future) interior switches.

For me it is a personal decision not to use CAN but RS485. CAN is not really easy and if you want to organize a project with and for people who never heard about microcontrollers ... its better not to use it.

I know there are way better solutions than Arduino and RS485 but for me, this is a goal " if you want to organize a project with and for people who never heard about microcontrollers"

The more spezialiced you get, the less people you will reach.

The questions for me are:

Can it do all I need?  Yes, Arduiono, RS485 and ordinary relays can.

Is it easy to learn? Yes, everybody can work with Arduino, because it is designed for that.

Can I afford it? Yes, the price should be lower than a new harness. The plan is to enable everybody to do the work himself. It should be way less, than installing a new harness. There should be (almost) no cost for additional work.

Will it be a lot of work? Yes and no. We have to seperate the work in a part, made outside the car and a part inside the car.

The part outside is to do programming and preparing work with Arduino and the small harnesses we need. This can be made in the living room (in winter time 🙂)

The part inside the car is hard to predict. Will be less than having a new harness installed, but enough for two weekends i quess,

Maybe the biggest benefit will be, that everybody knows, what is working there. So everybody will be able to fix it and add new functions to it.

 

Edited January 6 by Sigi_H

[Bowie69]

ESP32 is basically an Arduino on steroids, lots of IO, you can program it in the same way as Arduino, even using the Arduino IDE, so it is as easy as Arduino. 

You can also get ESP32 boards with built in CAN, and there's libraries out there to talk to other ESPs over wifi/BT, so you could run two ESPs at either end of the vehicle with no physical connection and still do all you want. 

It's also much, much faster than the Arduino, has much better support for storage and has multiple serial interfaces (unlike arduino). 

As far as CAN goes, I really don't think it ever complex, any more than serial, an interface either end and a loop to read the data and then you just make decisions on what to do with it. 

[Sigi_H]

I saw, there is a JTAG. Do I need the JTAG Interface for programming it?

I think the way to proram it should be very easy. For the Arduino everybody already has all the stuff.

So the arguments in favour of the ESP32 are the price and greater computing capacity?

Edited January 6 by Sigi_H

[elbekko]

2 minutes ago, Sigi_H said:

I saw, there is a JTAG. Do I need the JTAG Interface for programming it?

I think the way to proram it should be very easy. For the Arduino everybody already has all the stuff.

 

Nope, I just programmed it over USB.

In about an hour of fiddling around I had it connected to my WiFi and communicating with an API (just playing around).

12 minutes ago, Bowie69 said:

As far as CAN goes, I really don't think it ever complex, any more than serial, an interface either end and a loop to read the data and then you just make decisions on what to do with it. 

Agreed. I read up a bit on CAN recently, and it's beautifully simple really. No need for a clock signal, built in concurrency handling, ...

The ESP32 will natively do the CAN protocol, but needs a bit of extra hardware to actually connect to the CAN lines.

One of the main upsides of the ESP32 that I've found is that all the GPIO pins can do anything. PWM, I2C, CAN, ... just enable it on the pin and it'll do it. And a bunch of concurrent threads as well, apparently.

My goal for the CAN is a bit different, as I want to integrate with existing systems that speak CAN.

[Sigi_H]

Sounds pretty good to me