So I have been quite lately, been pretty busy studying very dry technical manuals on the CAN Bus developed by Bosch for automotive applications, which has put the 65C816 project on hold for now, as this project is related to my education at my college and I must put my priorities there I've been told.

Anyways, I am on my college's race team, we are building a electric car to compete in the Electrathon type races and I decided to volunteer to build the controller when as a group we decided how to share the duties.

So I have been working using the wheels that were donated to us. The wheels use the CAN Bus to control the system, with a controller in the motor, in the battery pack and in the console. The system is proprietary however so I didn't get any technical help from the company so any and all data I show you was found with my own personal work and is for educational use only (lest I get sued for doing my project )

Anyways this is the wheel running.



I built the test fixture in December the first week the college was "closed" for Christmas break (Christmas week), and I started working on figuring out the system this past week.

I connected my cheaper multimeter onto the system, and ran it for the whole 3+ hours I was running the wheel, multiple times, ran the batteries till they died 3 times so far, gaining data with different control variables put into the system. I used a ESD PCI card to read the CAN Bus data (my own personal purchase including the computer its inside of), and well things went pretty successfully.

Believe it or not, knowing even my basic level of Hexadecimal paid off, I manage to notice patterns in the code and I started to understand what was going on. And the variables that appear from experimentation so far to be the ones I am mostly after (to get the car going), I already have a understanding of. The other system variables with time can be tackled one at a time however.

The screen is not doing the card's output justice, the codes believe it or not are going at approximately 9 milliseconds each. So the code flys and all you see is very quick "snap shots" staring at it.

Now I have figured enough of the data that I will start to experiment using the values to fine tune my results and program a Arduino microcontroller (ie a AVR, but my teacher wants a Arduino compatible system) to control not one, but 2 wheels.

Dimitri

Well finally got around to really working on the controller this weekend,

Using the Console, I got the Arduino with CAN shield to talk to the console and everything is looking good.

Interestingly enough my ability to make educated guesses at the CAN bus meanings looking at the Hex code was bang on, everything I thought something was, was right based on tonight's testing.

In the next week I'll have a video of my controller running the wheel.

Dimitri

Talking from the Arduino, pretending to be something else, I can make the system think I am any link of the puzzle. and in the video you'll see me working as the console I somewhat proudly display as disconnected from the system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqIk8bsCeYI

Dimitri

And now running the sealed lead acid batteries we are to use.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=019vMTimBfM

Dimitri