Hello everyone. I'm fairly new to the Raspberry Pi, my first small electronics project. I'm also an engineering student. This project is mostly centered around Canbus. And hopefully putting my project up here will help others and help me when I hit a road block.
So first a quick overview of my project. To help get experience for fun and also to help with a future job, I'm doing this project. I have a RaspberryPi 3 with a PiCan2 board hooked up to my 2015 Honda Civic Si thru the OBDII port to access the Fast Can. Eventually I'll get the PiCanDuo board to access both the Fast Can and the Body Can, but that's later. I want to access some things like when Vtec is on, RPM is in a certain range, load of the engine is above a certain amount, etc. I want to then run my own program that will actuate an exhaust cutout. So when "vtec just kicked in yo" lol the exhaust will become a straight thru exhaust, but only during high load, high rpm situations. There's a product out there that already does this. I think it's called Vtec Climax but it's several hundred dollars and I want to do it myself, as I'm sure you all can understand.
So here is the progress I've made. I got a Pi 3 and the PiCan2 board hooked up. I'm waiting on a Mini Black Hat Hack3r to split the GPIOs so I can use the unused ones on a breadboard for prototyping (additional switches I have planned, LEDs for when the system is working, etc.). I setup the Pi and finally connected it to the internet to update it. To give context to why that last part was difficult for me, I'm running the Pi entirely thru command line issues from my Macbook connected thru an ethernet cable. The reason is because that how this project will run, without a screen or keyboard. Once the project is done, it will sit inside the car and operate all by itself, only needing to connect to my laptop for occasional update. At least this is my hope, lol. So after that I found out the PiCan2 board has an LED circuit. I downloaded wiringPi's code for GPIO use and got the LED to work via command lines. I then wrote a program that did the same thing, turn on and off the LED. Some of this may seem simple to you, but it is my first time doing something like this and is huge steps for me. But trying to mimic what I've learning in school and my internship of taking a big software project and breaking it down to little projects.
The stage I'm at is now the Canbus part. I am using the linux-can-utils software (from Volkswagen I think, haha). I have started to decode some of the Can packets, but it is difficult. The problem I have right now is with the cansniffer.c program. I noticed several other characters after the 8 bits of each can packet. Sometimes they are just "........" sometimes they change rapidly and with no perceivable pattern. What is this data???? or is it just garbage to be ignored???? Does anybody know?
Thanks for all your help in advanced. I hope this project is of interest to some people.