Thread: Mercedes 2005 C230 Kompressor CAN bus Questions

Do you know if there is CAN bus hardware that interfaces with a pc? Perhaps with a serial port or USB or ethernet. If something like this existed, it might be possible for me to write software to communicate on the Bus. I doubt this would be a small undertaking though and I know nothing about the bus.

i have had no problms when i removed my headunit but it is the standard cd player but i assume all teh others would be the same except the ones with a fiber optic amp connection

Originally Posted by ImInSanDiego

Do you know if there is CAN bus hardware that interfaces with a pc? Perhaps with a serial port or USB or ethernet. If something like this existed, it might be possible for me to write software to communicate on the Bus. I doubt this would be a small undertaking though and I know nothing about the bus.

There's tons of hardware available. My company sells Mongoose ISO/CAN for $195 which is a great choice. When you're shopping look for something that has a standard (J2534) device driver. Also make sure that it implements ISO15765 in hardware; otherwise your life will be difficult.

As long as you have your car there, just hookup and sniff the bus. Watch what your headunit does, reverse engineer the messages, and replicate them yourself.

I found this hardware interface. It comes with a can-bus scanner and claims that you can send and receive all types of can-bus data. Think it may work?

http://www.canusb.com/

Originally Posted by joeyoravec

There's tons of hardware available. My company sells Mongoose ISO/CAN for $195 which is a great choice. When you're shopping look for something that has a standard (J2534) device driver. Also make sure that it implements ISO15765 in hardware; otherwise your life will be difficult.

As long as you have your car there, just hookup and sniff the bus. Watch what your headunit does, reverse engineer the messages, and replicate them yourself.

This actually looks like a great option. I see that a DLL is provided and I would be able to write my own stuff easily as I'm a Labview programmer. Do you know if any Labview code has been done that already interfaces with the DLL?

Originally Posted by Puffanug

I found this hardware interface. It comes with a can-bus scanner and claims that you can send and receive all types of can-bus data. Think it may work?

http://www.canusb.com/

This also provides an ActiveX interface and source code for Labview which would get me started quickly. Looks like there are a lot of options for CAN. Now if I could find a list of all codes and messages for my mercedes.

Originally Posted by jac1502

i have had no problms when i removed my headunit but it is the standard cd player but i assume all teh others would be the same except the ones with a fiber optic amp connection

What year/model is your mercedes?

Originally Posted by jac1502

I know this is old but i have just finished my car computer and i want to get my steering volume controls working, have any luck?

Any pictures of your install?

That CanUSB looks like a creepy-little-box with a proprietary serial protocol. If it's using an ASCII protocol and a virtual COM port driver, I doubt it can keep up with full bandwidth CAN. Also it doesn't seem to implement ISO15765 in hardware. How would you ever implement that in software and get sub-millisecond turnaround??

You'd be better off buying a Mongoose or some other standard (SAE J2534) interface. If you start off with that CanUSB you'll spend a ton of time writing software to their half-baked serial protocol, and can't reuse your work with another vendor's equipment. In contrast a J2534 device provides a standard driver DLL with functions to connect, read, write, send periodic messages, etc so you can link against any driver. It's as easy as switching printers.

Too bad you're not in the Detroit area. I'm giving a presentation tomorrow at the Detroit LabVIEW Users Group on vehicle communication with LabVIEW. I developed a (free) LabVIEW driver for PassThru vehicle networking. It works great with Mongoose.