I think that we need to create a common repository/wiki database where we can share reverse engineered car information with a common standard, aiming at being able to automatically download a “descriptor” file that can run on an universal software.

This is not as hard as it seems; most of the data is usually extracted as the raw number, multiplied by a number, plus an offset. More complex formulas are not very common but exist and will be handled accordingly.

So, for every car, we have a page that states pinouts, bus speed, misc notes, and all the found messages. Log files can be shared and will be available for anyone to study.

Example page:

Car: Renault Twizy
Bus speed: 500Kbps

Pinouts:

– OBD connector
— Pin 6: CAN H
— Pin 14: CAN L

Messages:

Message specifics:

0x155 BMS status (10ms)

This is just a brief example; the table may need more columns (to define if the message is read only or if we can send it to activate stuff, a method to handle bitmapped statuses, etc.) but it’s just to explain the idea. There will be a standard way to describe requests and responses, and how to handle data spanning multiple messages.

The community will help to converge to a standard way to save log files, develop tools to convert them, study their content and publish results. I have a small collection of softwares I’ve written in these years that I will make available with an open source license. Other options are:

Kayak http://kayak.2codeornot2code.org/index.html
OVMS CAN-RE-tool https://github.com/openvehicles/CAN-RE-Tool
BusMaster http://rbei-etas.github.io/busmaster/