I am trying to add logging to a 2005 E46 M3. Has anyone been able to figure out the message format on the CAN-Bus?

Thanks
Peter

It was the last race of the weekend so I gave up and just drove. Debugging later I did discover the CAN interface had died and was causing problems. The Video4 could reboot spontaneously. The run file would say the logging was stopped for reasons unknown. It may be that the CAN interface was shortin...

Sunday's feature race was a good one but it wasn't on video. On the grid my Video4 refused to start logging no matter how many times I pressed the button. It had worked the rest of the weekend including Sunday morning. The only clue was a file RESTART.CMD. I did restart it a couple of times but to n...

I think rewiring the power to the battery solved it. Now I can start the engine and that will not kill the Video4. In terms of DC power, I was seeing around 11V when it crashed. But perhaps there was a transient level below that that was causing the trouble. Unfortunately my voltage logging was nor ...

I sold mine a while ago and now I regret it. Anyone got a used Dash1 they want to sell?

So what is the actual minimum voltage spec for the Video4/DL1? i.e. at what voltage would one expect the Video4 or DL1 to crash.... In a race car we have a lot of electrical compromises - wiring gage, battery size, underdriven alternators, batteries that have been sitting too long, etc. The DTA engi...

Working now. The issue was surrounding the flow of data around the serial ring. So here is what I was missing... Data flows via the serial cables in a chain or ring. The order in my case is DASH2 - CAN adapter - DL1 - Video4 - Dash2. The order is important to understand. If you get the order wrong, ...

Solved i think. It does appear to be power. Though I can not explain why. Fiddling in the driveway with video screen attached, if I load the battery (e.g. starting the car) and get the voltage to drop below 12V, then the screen will fill with garbage and it will take 20sec for the Video4 to recover....

It can actually. Having a high speed signal travelling down an unterminated data bus, the signal will bounce off the end of the cable and reflect back and forth on the bus. This is the same effect as a wave in a swimming pool reflecting off the wall of the pool. In the computer world, a SCSI cable n...

Another interesting clue. When reviewing the video, the next segment of video starts with a black screen with the gauges overlaid. Then the background camera comes in. Then the other cameras one by one. It's as if the video logger rebooted or something.

That's an interesting point. Looking at my last race, it got divided into 3 run files of: 13:32.33, 13:44.57, and 12:43.45... And the previous one: 15:31, 16:03, 3.44. Run files are about 8MB each and video files about 610-620 MB each. Run manager says... Data logged on 18/07/2010 @ 16:16. , using f...

I wonder if this explains why I am having so much trouble with the can adapter. CAN is a bus (like SCSI) and each end of the bus must have a termination resistor to absorb the signal and keep it from reflecting back and forth (lots of noise) on the bus. Since my connection from the DTA was only a fe...

Rob: Do you underdrive the alternator? Looking for patterns here. I have had so many problems with this that I decided to rewire the car. Doing that solved all sorts of nagging problems - except for this particular one. Next step is to build a simple storage supply with a capacitor, resistor, and di...

They are but no data is showing up. Also RPM reads as zero so how do I know which RPM it is logging? i.e. RPM from the Dash2 or RPM from the DL1? I am going to try to reload everything one more time. All the config files look okay to me but maybe they did not load in the hardware for some reason. Th...

I'm using the CAN bus adapter with the DTA S100 ECU. I am able to read values but the update frequency seems to be very infrequent. e.g. I get Throttle position but it has so few datapoints that it seems not to correspond to reality. In the CAN config I have the maximum update frequency set to 10Hz ...