Category: Lighting
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Lowflying Article – If Only Caterhams Could Talk, June/July 2020
I can’t really blame anyone for this article. Even when I was writing up the ECU work on this blog, I had it in my mind that I’d be able to do a Lowflying article at some time. Then, when Michael Calvert asked members if they could write more articles for the magazine ( because…
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Driving Clifton Suspension Bridge – YouTube Video
This is a quicky… The weather was good and we were coming out of lockdown, so decided to get the car out for its first small run of the year. The Video I took a much longer run to get fuel and out from Bristol to Leigh Woods, Failand and then back into Bristol over…
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Lowflying Article – Nervous Novices, April 2020
It was Brian’s fault! The local Bristol and Bath AR (Area Representative), Brian Hall had suggested my name to the Lotus7.club track-day co-ordinator Simon Maitland. Simon was looking for someone to do a piece in Lowflying (the Lotus7.club monthly magazine) about how good the club’s novice track-days are. Brian knew I didn’t mind putting pen…
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ECU Diagnostics – part 14 : Software Framework mbe.py
This is hopefully a reasonably short post about the software framework I’ve developed to help read sensor data from the MBE 9A4 ECU. The software is written in Python 3 and is available here: Caterham-OBD. However, I’m going to talk about using one file only which is mbe.py. The idea behind mbe.py is to “abstract”…
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ECU Diagnostics – part 13.3 : MBE-ISOTP
SUMMARY We now understand the communications protocol used by Easimap (the Windows software supplied by the ECU manufacturer) and can use it to ask the ECU for whatever data the car has to offer. We can then manipulate the responses we get back from the car and format them to make sense to us. TL;DR…
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ECU Diagnostics – part 13.2 : OBD-II
The OBD-II diagnostic protocol is well defined and information about it can be found in On-board Diagnostics. It’s a mish-mash of many diffrerent standards, both physical and electrical, that I’ll refer to as OBD-II. There’s also a complete breakdown of the Services and PIDs (see below) that can be found in On-board Diagnostic PIDs. I’ll talk…
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ECU Diagnostics – part 13.1 : MBE-Broadcast
The simplest of the three Caterham OBD port diagnostic protocols we know about is what I’ve called MBE-Broadcast. As soon as the car is put into ignition switch position 2, the ECU starts to spit out a this stream of data on the CAN bus. Unlike the OBD-II protocol and the MBE-ISOTP protocol, this a…
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ECU Diagnostics – part 13 : Three Diagnostic Protocols in the MBE 9A4 ECU
This one’s just a short post to introduce the next three posts. In our investigations of the MBE 9A4 ECU we’ve found three different diagnostics protocols supported on the OBD port. The following three posts will summarise what we’ve learnt about each protocol and will be updated with new information as it becomes available. 13.1…
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ECU Diagnostics – part 12 : OSI 7 Layers for Caterham Diagnostics
Communications protocols are often called protocol stacks… they’re layers, or stacks, of different protocols… one layered on top of the other from lowest level (hardware/physical) to highest level (software application). This is where the OSI 7 Layer model comes in… it standardises how we think about the layers and allows us to talk about where…
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ECU Diagnostics – part 11 : Logic Analyzer on the CAN Bus
To test out my theories and the code I’d been writing, I needed a simple test and a way to make sure the code (and I) was doing what I thought it should be. The code part was easy, take the JSON files I’d created from the Easimap EC2 file and use it to ask…