CAT 3208 monitoring

[davidbrady]

(02-27-2013 03:46)nedb Wrote:  Is anyone else hacking the 3208/Arduino frontier? Care to share?
Ned Bedinger
'91 SP36

This is great Ned. I've been wanting to do this for some time but lately I've gotten myself sidetracked...

I have an Arduino development platform loaded on my lenovo Thinkpad running slackware 14.0, and I've been writing really basic software for my Arduino Uno, simple stuff just to get the configuration and makefiles sorted out. I haven't yet bought any shields. I'd like to build a sensor area network for my bus to collect parameters that the DDEC doesn't monitor, so heck yeah, let's put our heads together to see what we can come up with. I agree, stretching wires is the last thing I want to do.

Of course my bus is J1587 equipped and I have Silverleaf's VMSpc up front. So the natural thing for me to do is take my fan speed data and push it onto my J1587 bus as a diagnostic PID, but I haven't found a gateway (or shield) to help me do that. Because the J1587 bus is mission critical for the engine, transmission, and ABS brakes I want to be careful about interfacing to it, and I may abandon it all together in favor of a separate network. So maybe we can find a solution that'll work for both of us, maybe an 802.11 Wi-Fi shield: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11287

VMSpc gives me a fairly complete view of what's happening at the engine, but there are still a bunch of items I'd like to sense: fans speed, engine room temperature, engine vibration, etc. There are a host of sensors available to the hobbyist, https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11283 Some of these will work for a while, but they're not exactly engine room hardened.

I've never written software for Microsoft Windows, so I'm a little wet when it comes to putting together a GUI to display gauges. My easy way out is to use VMSpc, but that's an expensive option if you don't already have it.

So yeah Ned, let's roll!

(02-27-2013 10:17)Arcticdude Wrote:  But we can't fix them anymore, because you need a $10k computer to talk to the $3500 computer to see if it can tell the bigger computer what's wrong.

Sensors, schmensors!! You can keep them!!

John, I think that's the rub, "we can't fix them anymore". Why is that? Because we don't have the source code, the development environment, nor a way to connect to the proprietary systems in our vehicles - we don't have the tools. That's the frustration. If we had those things then debugging electronic engines is no different from debugging a mechanical engine's overheating, or vibration, or smoke out the stack. In the mechanical engine we break out our wrenches and we pride ourselves on fixing it. Well with our homebrew sensor area network it's the same deal. We break out our software tools and we fix it. As long as we have the tools, and we do cause we wrote the stuff, it's a non issue. The frustration with today's "can't fix 'em anymore" vehicles is really a frustration over a lack of tools.

Now, tell me you wouldn't like to know when your fan is on or off, and whether it's operating within the correct rpm range?