The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

#634 – The CAN bus can! with Dr Ken Tindell


Listen Later

Welcome Dr Ken Tindell of Canis Labs

  • Ken heard episode #631 where Chris was talking about a Noisy Rude Bus and he objected. Stringently (it seems Ken has since pulled down the posts, but they were in good fun)
  • Chris had been planning to talk about Ken’s recent awesome post about CAN hacking and cars being stolen, so he asked Ken to be on the show!
  • CAN was invented to reduce weight in car cable harnesses, which were increasing rapidly with more electrical features being included.
  • CAN vs LIN
  • CAN was expensive, but LIN is cheap because it’s bit banging the protocol from a microcontroller
  • There are bridges to go between CAN and LIN buses.
  • Modern cars have 20-100 ECUs (controllers), but it depends on the features the car has. But that’s not just microcontrollers, Ken estimates that could be as high as 700.
  • Chris and Ken both had dealth with Philips / Freescale / NXP / Motorola as silicon vendors in the automotive space
  • How does a tiny microcontroller get data onto the bus?
  • Prioritized traffic
  • CAN indentifier field has priority baked in
  • Bus works like a giant AND gate where the lowest address wins
  • 11 bits
  • How to unwind CAN traffic
  • Packing signals into CAN frame
  • Tools to reverse engineer
  • Protocol decoder for sigrok
  • CAN HG
  • 250kb is slow
  • CAN bus bandwidth
  • There is Ethernet in cars now, especially with more and more cameras
  • Bandwidth vs latency
  • Addressing through a gateway
  • Atomic broadcasts means you know that each device has processed it
  • Protocol hacking
  • Trucks aren’t OEM based so more vertically integrated
  • SAE J1939 standard in trucks
  • If say Toyota develops the CAN messages, DBC files decode everything.
  • But manufacturers don’t publish them, so some car messages are reverse engineered
  • Accessories bus
  • Who has access to DBCs?
  • Diagnostic systems
  • OBD2
  • CARB
  • CAN is physical ISO 11898
  • CAN XL has IP packets, so you can use wireshark
  • Ken has written about wireshark
  • CAN 2.0, CAN FD
  • Devices on a bus are normally all bare metal or RTOS because of the timing requirements
  • OSEK standard
  • Embedded system abstraction
  • Dealing with the magnitude of decisions making in the automotive industry
  • Chris asked about whether self-driving will happen in 5 or 20 years? (ie. does he agree with Chris or Dave). It was the latter, sadly.
  • Autonomic Cars podcast with Dr Phil Coopman
  • ...more
    View all episodesView all episodes
    Download on the App Store

    The Amp Hour Electronics PodcastBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

    • 4.9
    • 4.9
    • 4.9
    • 4.9
    • 4.9

    4.9

    225 ratings


    More shows like The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

    View all
    The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source by Changelog Media

    The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

    285 Listeners

    Embedded by Logical Elegance

    Embedded

    190 Listeners

    LINUX Unplugged by Jupiter Broadcasting

    LINUX Unplugged

    266 Listeners

    Talk Python To Me by Michael Kennedy

    Talk Python To Me

    580 Listeners

    Circuit Break - A MacroFab Podcast by MacroFab, Inc.

    Circuit Break - A MacroFab Podcast

    37 Listeners

    Python Bytes by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken

    Python Bytes

    214 Listeners

    Late Night Linux by The Late Night Linux Family

    Late Night Linux

    153 Listeners

    Darknet Diaries by Jack Rhysider

    Darknet Diaries

    7,822 Listeners

    Ham Radio Workbench Podcast by Ham Radio Workbench

    Ham Radio Workbench Podcast

    189 Listeners

    CoRecursive: Coding Stories by Adam Gordon Bell - Software Developer

    CoRecursive: Coding Stories

    185 Listeners

    Hackaday Podcast by Hackaday

    Hackaday Podcast

    64 Listeners

    Self-Hosted by Jupiter Broadcasting

    Self-Hosted

    136 Listeners

    The Real Python Podcast by Real Python

    The Real Python Podcast

    137 Listeners

    2.5 Admins by The Late Night Linux Family

    2.5 Admins

    89 Listeners

    Oxide and Friends by Oxide Computer Company

    Oxide and Friends

    48 Listeners