Last Saturday was the first meeting at Hive13. On Friday, I gave a talk about reversing the Honda Nav system and a quick intro to CAN and Open Garages. Saturdays turnout was much smaller so we mainly described CAN to a few people and worked on some of the new tools.
Dave B shared some info on his CAN in the Middle Device. The HW porn is posted up on the site with some specs: http://wiki.hive13.org/CANiTM
I released a tool called CANiBUS. This was originally going to be the front-end for just the CAN in the Middle device but we thought we could do much more with it. So there is a CANIBUS Server that can connect to one or more CAN devices (and cars) The client interface is separate. It uses an XML protocol to talk between client and server. Clients connect and can select a CAN device to start a “hack session” on. This gives us a lot of flexibility in that you can have a classroom full of people and work on one car w/o overloading the battery. You can also have people connect in remotely and work on the same car and even have read-only instructor modes, etc. Separate clients allows for different interfaces to specialize in different things. They could also run on any platform, device, tablet, etc. A chat interface is also built in, both for the lobby and individual hack sessions.
While this code is still uber alpha, we have released the source:
http://wiki.hive13.org/CANiBUS
It also comes with a Ncurses client that I use to test out the protocol, bonus is that it can easily run on a headless CANiBUS server and can be operated over SSH.
We still have a TON to do. The OpenGarages site still needs a lot of work, policy documents still need to be drafted as well as actual on-car hacking time. We are hoping by next months meeting we will have a CAN in the Middle prototype board ready as well as at least ELM327 Can support (Uber cheap OBD Scantool) as well as a CAN simulator for testing and developing clients.
Craig