What's this then?

[pat_pending]

I spent 45 years as a mechanic working on cars, trucks and plant.

I was working at a main dealer until last year but with the ever increasing use of electronics I'd had enough and retired!                                                                          Not because I didn't understand, quite the opposite. I was level 4 EV qualified and a diagnostic specialist, but the job had become so far removed from why I used to enjoy spannering  that I'd come to hate it.                                                                                                                                                                                                              I love the simplicity and the "agricultural" nature of older Land Rovers, the fact you can modify, adapt and fabricate with some scrap and the bits and pieces that we all have kicking about.

That's what those mad old vehicles being built in the 80s were all about.

I love Land Rovers for many of the reasons others hate them, there's nothing wrong with making things a bit better, but when I read about people trying to overly modernise them, especially with electronics, it makes me wonder why they bought a Land Rover in the first place.

[geoffbeaumont]

3 hours ago, Snagger said:

Probably.  The trouble is, you need a certain level of knowledge of electronics or software just to be able to learn more or ask the right questions, and many of us don’t have even that foundation.

The same applied to the spanner work before you got started!

[miketomcat]

TSD said to me once if I spent the same amount of time playing with computers I'd be able to do all these things. However I don't have the inclination or interest so I don't.

Mike

[JeffR]

Having spent days of my life having to use a computer to interrogate  the family passats (err kinda acquired another one yesterday....), the relatively simple electrics of my defenders and mini are simply bliss.

[FridgeFreezer]

On 2/23/2024 at 8:31 PM, pat_pending said:

I think the golden age of building/modding road going vehicles is gone, maybe not the off roaders though.

I disagree - in many ways it's never been easier or more accessible. Tools & equipment have all gotten cheaper and better, knowledge is easy to find & mostly free, and the internet is global so one random guy in a shed on the other side of the world can whip up a thing to solve a very specific problem and sell it to the other 100 interested people in the world no matter how niche it is - and anything not niche gets reverse-engineered in China and flogged on eBay for $5.99 where it might previously have been a locked down dealer-only dongle costing hundreds.

Also stuff going electric means that manufacturers and regulators can't beat tinkerers over the head with complaints about emissions or noise etc. like they can with engine swap and old school tuning.

Electrics / electronics aren't that hard (as said, they follow fairly basic logic most of the time), certainly no more complicated or fiddly than trying to encourage carburettors to behave themselves for example. And you don't need to know *much* about it to make it work, any more than you have to know the full intricacies of TCP/IP to be able to send an email.

[elbekko]

8 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:

and anything not niche gets reverse-engineered in China and flogged on eBay for $5.99 where it might previously have been a locked down dealer-only dongle costing hundreds.

Yes and no. I've been going through sort of this with the Mercedes. Everything is available on the interwebs (mainly MHHauto), you just need to figure it out, and trawl through the millions of people that say "pm me, I can do it for you for money". No thanks, that's not what I want to do.
But on the flipside, I did manage to get talking to it with a €180 Tactrix OpenPort, and a €30 "donation" to get access to MHHauto to obtain all the software.

The biggest issue is that all the information is closely guarded, and nobody wants to properly document any of it. There are some libraries of known CAN messages and such, but they're very limited. If that wasn't the case, it would be very simple to integrate CAN systems.

[FridgeFreezer]

2 hours ago, elbekko said:

The biggest issue is that all the information is closely guarded, and nobody wants to properly document any of it.

True, although your Merc is quite new still - by the time it's a bit older people will have worked more of it out as more of them fall into the hands of tinkerers.

[elbekko]

1 hour ago, FridgeFreezer said:

True, although your Merc is quite new still - by the time it's a bit older people will have worked more of it out as more of them fall into the hands of tinkerers.

Well, the Merc I'm not really messing around with CANbus stuff, just want to program some options in the modules so maybe it'll tiddle me off less often

But even for the P38, there's barely any information available on the CAN messages between the Motronic and ZF gearbox. Maybe I haven't searched enough, or correctly. Even the incorrect-answers-machine doesn't pretend to know:

[simonr]

22 minutes ago, elbekko said:

But even for the P38, there's barely any information available on the CAN messages

The reason is JLR (and other manufacturers) guard this info very closely!  I worked for a company who had bought (and it was a LOT of money) the list of CAN PID's for Range Rover.  They wouldn't even let me look at it!  The NDA appeared to list the specific people permitted to view the data.  They were developing the surround-view camara system for JLR & even though they were working on a project for JLR, they still had to buy the info.  Even their list was redacted to the extent that some of it had to be reverse-engineered.

I was surprised by the level of secrecy!

13 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:

I disagree - in many ways it's never been easier or more accessible.

Some & some.  Accessing some of the functionality is fairly easy & cheap.  Some of it, not so much.  At least with something mechanical, you can figure out most of it by looking & measuring.

Most of the problems in vehicles are still mechanical or (basic) electrical.  It's rare for problems to be with the firmware and often the same firmware can assist in diagnosing the problem.  So, for most of problems, the computers just give you another tool to help figure it out.

That said, I do like vehicles having CAN networks - just because it gives even more options to hack / improve / repurpose things.

[elbekko]

4 minutes ago, simonr said:

The reason is JLR (and other manufacturers) guard this info very closely!  I worked for a company who had bought (and it was a LOT of money) the list of CAN PID's for Range Rover.  They wouldn't even let me look at it!  The NDA appeared to list the specific people permitted to view the data.  They were developing the surround-view camara system for JLR & even though they were working on a project for JLR, they still had to buy the info.  Even their list was redacted to the extent that some of it had to be reverse-engineered.

I was surprised by the level of secrecy!

Precisely. And sadly reverse engineering this stuff is what scares off a lot of people - me half included. I've been meaning to do it for ages, but haven't gotten around to it. And I wouldn't be surprised if JLR goes after people sharing that info either, even if they reverse engineered it themselves...

Years ago I reverse-engineered the radio to CD changer communication (BMW IBus), which already had a bit of open-source documentation. I never got that to work reliably, even though it should've been stupidly simple. It would randomly stop communicating, probably because there was some secret handshake that I hadn't seen in the logs.
And that was a simple protocol with a dozen messages that are all triggered by buttons. Reverse engineering ECM to gearbox communication will most likely be a lot more involved, although hopefully in '99 it wasn't so bad yet.

The VW @AlWorms built is most likely a lot easier because VW is very modular, and it all speaks largely the same language - so it's more convincing the modules that they *want* to talk to each other, not as much *how* they talk to each other.

[simonr]

21 minutes ago, elbekko said:

Reverse engineering ECM to gearbox communication will most likely be a lot more involved, although hopefully in '99 it wasn't so bad yet.

If anything, it's become easier!  More modern vehicles have more individual networks as well as bridges between them - which limit the amount of data traffic on any one network.

My general approach has been to build / write a 2 port bridge and insert it between the ECM and the thing you want to control.  All traffic has to flow through the bridge.

Initially, you just block individual packets from reaching the device, and look for when it starts to malfuction.  This will tellyou the address of the device from the ECM's point of view.  The packets sent by the device will give you the addresses of everything it wants to talk to.  You then just filter out everything outside that address range.  If it continues to work, you know you've got everything.

Then it's relatively easy to see which packets change with things like RPM or Temperature.  Try waiting for a packet addressed to the device to come from the ECM, change the data and send it on to the device.  Some devices require the timing of packets to be accurate - so letting the ECM initiate the transfer, avoids that mostly.

By breaking down the problem, it becomes much easier & quicker to solve.

This was the last one I made: https://github.com/SimonRafferty/Polaris-GENERAL---CANBUS-Bridge
But I've used the same hardware & software configuration several times.

[FridgeFreezer]

No matter how complex or locked down the electronics are though, it always comes down to some sensor or actuator actually doing the work - just like you can bolt Megasquirt to anything that runs on fuel & spark, things like gearboxes ultimately have some sensors & solenoids to make them work and if the info is too hard to find you can hang some wires off the important bits and reverse-engineer a new controller for it that does what you want with none of the nonsense.

Granted it takes time & effort but that's also where the internet comes in - you can spread the time & effort & knowledge around and get results faster.

[elbekko]

3 minutes ago, FridgeFreezer said:

things like gearboxes ultimately have some sensors & solenoids to make them work and if the info is too hard to find you can hang some wires off the important bits and reverse-engineer a new controller for it that does what you want with none of the nonsense.

Absolutely, but as you know it's not a simple on/off either. That was my initial motivation for looking into Haltech engine management, as they can do gearbox control. But they warn that they haven't run it on a 4HP24E yet, so tuning is up to the user. If you can just talk to the original ECU instead, you don't have to worry about replicating thousands of hours of OEM development time...

19 minutes ago, simonr said:

If anything, it's become easier!  More modern vehicles have more individual networks as well as bridges between them - which limit the amount of data traffic on any one network.

My general approach has been to build / write a 2 port bridge and insert it between the ECM and the thing you want to control.  All traffic has to flow through the bridge.

Initially, you just block individual packets from reaching the device, and look for when it starts to malfuction.  This will tellyou the address of the device from the ECM's point of view.  The packets sent by the device will give you the addresses of everything it wants to talk to.  You then just filter out everything outside that address range.  If it continues to work, you know you've got everything.

Then it's relatively easy to see which packets change with things like RPM or Temperature.  Try waiting for a packet addressed to the device to come from the ECM, change the data and send it on to the device.  Some devices require the timing of packets to be accurate - so letting the ECM initiate the transfer, avoids that mostly.

By breaking down the problem, it becomes much easier & quicker to solve.

This was the last one I made: https://github.com/SimonRafferty/Polaris-GENERAL---CANBUS-Bridge
But I've used the same hardware & software configuration several times.

That seems like a solid approach, and indeed similar to what I've been meaning to do. Just haven't gotten around to actually doing it...

[Gazzar]

On 2/24/2024 at 9:24 AM, AlWorms said:

I reckon a lot of "mechanical" people don't *think* they understand electronics, but it's all just logic... and if they had it explained and put in some effort, they'd probably understand it more than they think they would be capable of.

I love the simplicity of my Disco 1. It just does what it should.

However, my Daily driver is something I built. Not really super complicated, or "modern", but a 2006 VW Touran 7 seater, with the 3.2 VR6 engine, 6 speed manual and 4WD from a 2006 Golf R32. Because of the CAN-bus systems, wiring changes were fairly simple (for a nerd, like meeeee!), where a non-CAN car probably would have needed 4 or 5 TIMES the number of wires altered.

The advantage of electronics, is that you don't have to modify every single mechanical part or spend hours making things work physically, because electronics can be "fiddled" - like an electronic autobox can be "adjusted" to do what you want, easier than trying to alter governors and valve bodies to get the desired outcome. Changing some code and uploading via USB can be done hundreds of times without much time consumed, but physically adjusting something to see if it works and then changing back and forth ca be painfully time consuming.

This is interesting! I've been given a golf estate, 2l diesel dsg, circa 2010. Fine car, no doubt, but, meh. Poverty spec, so all the good basics, no clever toys by modern standards.

I hadn't realised it is viable to play with it, I thought these things were sealed disposable appliances so that's really interesting! AWD and raised suspension appeal. 

[AlWorms]

They're like Lego!

I have Tiguan front springs, Skoda Scout rears (so it's raised about 20mm from stock). the driveshafts don't allow much more. There are plenty of Audi, Skoda, VW, Seat etc cars all running the same basic chassis.

Mine has some bits from Audi, Skoda, Porsche and VW all in there 😁

Edited February 27 by AlWorms

[Daan]

On 2/23/2024 at 8:31 PM, pat_pending said:

I think the golden age of building/modding road going vehicles is gone, maybe not the off roaders though.

I remember an awful lot of crazy stuff being knocked up in lock up's, sheds, and at the roadside, usually with minimal tools.

A mate built a Range Rover/series hybrid (when they were the in thing) in two abandoned council lock up's, with power from a nearby lamp post, another built a chopper in the spare bedroom of a ground floor flat.

Alas, youth and enthusiasm gone and too many regulations today.

I've just remembered, one of our group had a 109 with a six pot Jag' engine in it that was positively dangerous!

I think we are now spoilt with much better cars; we used to do engine conversions, disc brake conversions, coil spring conversions, because the old stuff was just not very good. Now, we don't have bad cars anymore (although there are a few un reliable ones!).

Also, the SVA is mandatory on a lot of stuff, and people don't bother, even because of the above. What I also see, is that potential donor vehicles are getting rare and sought after, which does not invite to modify them. What we see more of, especially in offroading is brand new builds, like in Ultra 4. I much more liked the old days were people modified production cars. I was more accesible back then, now you mostly need tons of money to compete. Do I sound old now?

[Gazzar]

Yep. Modern cars are very good. In general. Nicely boring.

[FridgeFreezer]

15 hours ago, Daan said:

I was more accesible back then, now you mostly need tons of money to compete.

I do think the grass-roots has gotten further from the big boys, you can still rock up at a Shire play-day in anything from a stock Evoque to a fire-breathing challenge motor but if you wanted to do any of the competitions the barrier for entry appears to be about 50k and a willingness to do another 1k in damage every time out

[Bowie69]

38 minutes ago, FridgeFreezer said:

if you wanted to do any of the competitions the barrier for entry appears to be about 50k

Depends on the competition type, round here there's lots of trials run by EDORC which can handle road going vehicles, it's only if you want to do winch challenge stuff the prices gets up there.

Dirt Nationals has an interesting class structure, one team is using a gutted Jimny with stock drivetrain to learn all about speed, suspect they only spent about £4K total on it including all the safety gear.