Show me how to fish. Macchina noob

So i just received my M2 UTD with the cellular kit today. There was just a link on a piece of paper to a getting started guide that only showed me how to run the arduino IDE. The youtube channel is even worse. Anyway, can someone point me to documentation on setting up the cellular modules, example sketches, and how to use the M2 to reverse engineer my can buss. Honda civic 2016.

help me learn to fish. :slight_smile:

Haven’t heard that the Cellular stuff is actually working yet. Your best bet is to try getting it working with just the M2 without the cellular kit installed.

I’m not aware of any cellular related work being done yet either. Perhaps someone is working on it.

I’m in a better position to talk about how to use the M2 to reverse engineer CAN buses in vehicles. And, the first thing I should mention is that someone has already done a lot of reverse engineering on your particular car: https://github.com/commaai/opendbc You’ll find a 2016 Honda Civic Touring with lots of data already defined. Of course, it is in DBC format which means it probably won’t make a lot of sense to you without a program which can interpret a DBC and then use the definitions to interpret CAN data for you. That leads to wanting to have data to interpret.

  1. I wrote an Arduino sketch called M2RET which supports the CAN buses on the M2 and lets you capture the traffic. At the moment there are some library issues because things are being rewritten and moved around but it should be possible to compile it with the current library versions listed at the below link. It’s a bit daunting to compile though. If you have trouble I can provide a binary that can be flashed without needing to compile.
    https://github.com/collin80/M2RET

  2. I wrote SavvyCAN, a desktop PC app that connects to an M2 running M2RET and provides a GUI for capturing, sending, and interpreting frames.
    www.savvycan.com (Binaries are available so don’t compile it unless you need to)

With those two things you would be able to get started. Since SavvyCAN can load and save DBC files you can even use the data from the github I linked to in order to get a jump start. Well, maybe, let me know if it works. I had scant documentation on DBC files so sometimes people generate DBC files that don’t conform to my expectations. I fix this things as they’re found.

I’ll have to ask where your current skill set is though. Reverse engineering CAN data isn’t really a simple process and there’s a lot of knowledge that I could presuppose you have but might not. It’s helpful to know where you’re starting from in order to provide more advice about what to do first and what you should know.

But, yeah, some people are getting the hardware but don’t quite know what to do with it. More examples and documentation would help but it takes time to do all that. I did write some examples for the M2 early on. I’ll see what I can find.

This is the only guidance for cellular that I am aware of at the moment: Digi XBee Cellular LTE modem example