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Second session with the SAMC21 Xplained Pro board showed another small trouble. CAN bus example does not work as intended. When trying "Quick Start for the SAM CAN Driver - SAM C21 Xplained Pro" hopes were that everything will work out of the box. SAMC21 Xplained Pro board was hooked up to CARINO LC. Trying to send data from SAMC21 resulted in a failure. SAMC21 was giving an error message (with some spelling mistakes of course:)) . The error message looked like this: "Protocal error, please double check the clock in two boards". After doing what is advised, baud rates on both devices (SAMC21 and CARINO LC) were set to 500kbps. This means one of the following: either CARINO LC or SAMC21 boards do not work as intended. Even though CARINO LC was tested in various environments, its functionality was rechecked with another development board (ATSAM4E Xplained Pro). Communication was working without problems, which lead to the second assumption. Something is wrong with the SAMC21 board or its firmware.

Some time ago I purchased one of Atmel's development kits SAMC21Xplained pro. Microcontroller on it looks like very promising part for a car hacker or person who is building something for the automotive industry. It has two CAN busses. More importantly - it also supports FD-CAN, which is quite new standard that is used in the newest cars on the market.

CARINO LC is a tool to unleash people's creativity and inspire development and creation of products related to cars. CARINO LC allows to monitor and change the behaviour of your car. It allows to collect and send information within two data networks that exist in the car - CAN (Controller Area Network) and LIN (Local Interconnect Network). In addition to that, it allows to control and monitor electrical systems that are not connected to these networks. This is especially useful for older cars with less sophisticated electronics.

An update to work being done with Elduino CAN128. The board is changing the name to CARINO LC to better represent its use and functionality. Some improvements have been done in the design of the board.

A quick preliminary list of changes, improvements and new features:

This is a short description of the connections on Elduino CAN128 board.

After building the CAN sniffer with Elduino CAN128 board I wanted to see CAN messages in my old Ford Mondeo.

After connecting the board to OBD2 connector and turning on the ignition I started seeing quite a few packets. This is a very good sign - it shows that the board is connected properly, CAN baud rate is correct and that the Arduino software works.

Few weeks ago I have figured out that my old Ford Mondeo's ECU and ABS module are connected to the CAN bus. I was willing to hack the messages and make something useful. However, I could not find any valuable information about my Ford's CAN bus messages and their contents. The only thing I found is that RPM  and gas pedal values are in the packet sent with CAN id of 0x201.

Happily I have an Elduino CAN128 board which is Arduino-like board targeted for car hackers. It has built in modules and transceivers allowing to connect it to CAN and LIN busses without any external shields.

As mentioned in the previous post, I am working on the new board.  When designing hardware it is usually very hard to define final requirements of the design. Quite often you have to add something you have never tested before in a real life. Also, it is very rare to make things work from the first time, mostly there is allways something to tweak after you have your device built.

Playing with Arduino mega 2560 board I started liking the concept of having easily stackable standardized hardware. Since I am interested in electric vehicles, car electronics and CAN bus in cars I started looking for Arduino version with CAN support. Quick research gave me the only solution - an Arduino shield which uses SPI-CAN converter. This is a nice implementation of CAN bus on Arduino powered device, but it is still not what I was looking for. During a couple of long nights I came up with a concept of my own version of Arduino board which would have the AT90CAN series microcontroller as a heart.

Introduction

Once in a while you make your woman angry. So angry, she refuses to talk to you and even shows the middle finger instead. Here we can use technology to brake the ice and start the conversation again! I proudly present you the Ice breaker - a device, mediator, allowing you to make the angriest woman speak to you again :) "How?" - you ask. Simply - put the technology between you. Put your Arduino close to your girlfriend and type the question. Question will appear on the LCD and there will be only two possible answers - Yes or No. This will prevent you from having those nasty answers and dramatically improve the possibility to get at least some answers from your girlfriend :)