A flat battery already!

.. I left the damned interior light on, trying to get the MP3 player remember the “Random” setting when playing from USB.

I didn’t see it was on as it was raining last night and I was too focused on getting the oldest kid inside.

I tried to clutch start it, figuring it was just the interior light, couldn’t be that flat, surely.. stuck it in 2nd, rolled down the driveway, but just nothing there.

I’ve been planning on either selling off the Sonata recently (fully disclosing every single issue with it), to deregistering it and leaving it there to rust out or getting it to scrap metal.

Thankfully progress has been slow, and so the car is still registered. It’s battery which was sure to be flat was surprisingly capable of starting the car – and no more belt squeal for some reason. That’s probably related to the trip out to the dump last weekend – though it needed a charge to make that trip.

I was tossing up between charging the battery in the Pulsar overnight or getting jumper cables and taking it for a spin to get the battery charged – speedy jumper cables won, and worked surprisingly well (I was expecting to have to get the Sonata revved up – but not so).

Fuel was low (as expected, I wanted to run the fuel down in the Sonata so it didn’t sit there with a lot of fuel), I drove it 20ks to work and figured it probably would run out of fuel on the way home at some point – so had to add more fuel. I’ll burn it off somehow.

The Sonata stinks too though, it had a bad leak on the passenger side, and pretty much had a lake on the passenger side that soaked the carpet – it stunk and still does.

Back to it though, I’ve been trying to find a feasible method of communication with the ECU of the Pulsar. The Sonata had used MUT (Mitsubishi protocol), for data. Nissan have their own Consult II protocol, which doesn’t seem to have much on the net in terms of how it operates.

OBDII is non existent I think. So I’m looking at other communication methods so I don’t have to solder on to the injector and speedo wires as I did in the Sonata for the Carduino. The Data connector exists, perhaps OBD II is there but the cable I used to connect was not functional – so I am going to attempt that.

Then I will sus out if there is “CAN” communication – “Controller Area Network” communication, this allows the ECU to talk to other parts of the car – such as Transmission in Auto cars, or in the case of ours, the Combination Meter (Odometer display) also would be talking to it. If I can chase that out, I can run that to the OBD II connector and that would give me communication to the ECU.download Underworld: Blood Wars movie

I dislike having to use the remote to skip tracks / set random mode that our head unit has – so I want to rig up something with that to send signals directly, mounting some buttons above the unit.

Then I want to add an annoying speaker to the interior light, thus if it’s on, it’ll be damned annoying, and only turn off with the doors shut (or turned off), thus preventing it happening again.