Project Date:
February 9, 2009
Vehicle: 1994 Saab 900S
Using a RS232 to CAN converter, I wrote some Matlab code to listen for certain types of messages on the CAN bus and display interesting information about the vehicle in a Matlab figure window.
Each CAN message has a header of three hexadecimal digits (ie., 3EF) which specifies what the message contains and which device is sending the message. By reverse engineering (and finding some helpful sources online which I have since lost), I was able to write handlers for about 19 messages. The code was setup to be very modular; I could add new message handlers as I was able to reverse engineer them.
The ultimate goal was to be able to send and receive proprietary messages to the various devices throughout the car (as in change settings that are not normally exposed to the owner and require exorbitant dealer charges to change). I lost interest in this project when a newer (faster!) 2000 Saab 9-3 Turbo became available :)