With enough samples, the code can home in on the proper CAN ID automatically. Rather than having to manually examine all the messages passing through the network and trying to ascertain what they correspond to, his program listens while the user repeatedly presses the button they want to identify. That’s where the code is working on comes in.

The tricky part is figuring out what you’re looking for. He breaks his sample Sketch down line by line explaining how it all works so that even if you’ve never touched an Arduino before, you should be able to get the gist of what’s going on.Īs it turns out, reading messages on the CAN bus and acting on them is fairly straightforward. starts off his write-up with an overview of how you can read and parse CAN messages on the Arduino with the MCP2515 chip. Ultimately, he hopes that his tool will allow users to rapidly integrate custom hardware into their vehicle without having to drill a hole in the dashboard for a physical control.īut if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to have things done for them (a safe bet, since you’re reading Hackaday), don’t worry. Knowing how intimidating this can be to work with, has been working on some software that promises to make working with CAN bus user interfaces faster and easier. But today, that concept is increasingly becoming a quaint memory.Īssuming your modern car even has physical buttons, pushing one of them likely sends a message over the CAN bus that the recipient device will (hopefully) respond to. There was potentially a relay in the mix, but still, it wasn’t too hard to follow wires through the harness and figure out where they were going. In the old days, a physical button or switch on the dashboard of your car would have been wired to whatever device it was controlling.

Car hacking tools