I spent the last few weeks attempting to determine what 5 bytes are necessary to initialise the connection to the car ECU.
I tried a few methods of discovering just what the ones and zeros were telling me, and tonight, a break through, I now know precisely the 5 bytes used to initialise the Nissan ECU for Consult II protocol (and the ECU reply)!
The next is to then get discovering the raw data. The bytes always require calculation to derive the real value (i.e. Hex: 0A is what might be returned for RPM – but you won’t find a car doing 10 RPM). Of course fishing out what the PIDs are and those calculations is going to be fun.
I do hope to discover most of the information available and gather it then set up a microcontroller and small LCD display with it for data logging purposes.
That can then store info on real time fuel economy, giving the driver feedback as to whether the current style matches desired consumption (important with fuel prices catching reality). It has other reasonable uses too, log speed and attach a GPS and you can get some idea of what the car was doing and where. Get cameras and the above GPS and you can log useful information there too.
That’s off in the distance, I’ve still got to get the connection going, get the bytes moving and get the code written.
But on that note, why is it that when the simple solution is staring me right in the face (literally in some cases), I take the longest road?