Greetings!
You folks all pretty much know me and my mountain of projects by now. Well, I've added one more to that ever growing list.
Behold! A Model S 17" MCU and IC running on the bench.
And a short video of the minor success and tinkering I've done getting these guys running on the bench:
Tesla Model S Hacking - Running the MCU and IC on the Bench - YouTube
Nothing too exciting just yet, but this is step one for sure.
I sent the video and some pics to a friend earlier and his response was: "I think you might want to go in for service. The car appears to be missing." lol
At this time I've gotten a few things accomplished:
So far it's a short list, but I plan on expanding it greatly. Since I have this unit on the bench from a salvage vehicle I have no warranty fears and basically nothing to prevent me from tinkering. If I break it... oh well, I'm not down a vehicle.
Some goals:
Lot's to be done. One of the things I'll need to be able to do is convince this setup to "start" the car. Currently it won't "start" when I "press" the brake pedal since there are a lot of things it can't communicate with. I'm hoping that I can fake it out by playing back portions of CAN logs from actual vehicles and maybe eventually get the IC to the "on" screen. Keep in mind that literally the only things I have hooked up currently are the MCU and IC. No other modules that would sit on the CAN buses. So everything it is displaying about the car (battery SoC, mileage, door positions, etc) is saved and displayed since it is the last thing it saw while it was connected and powered in the actual salvage vehicle.
Essentially one of my main goals with this is to find a way to add functionality to the units one way or another that can be utilized in a working car without causing any major concerns. Additionally I want to get a better understanding of everything that the car does (specifically on the CAN bus and the ethernet connections) to potentially be able to use that info for non-Tesla based diagnostic info and such. For example, I would really love to know what my pack voltage was at any given time, or the numeric power usage value.
Should be fun, and I welcome any insight anyone might have into how to go about some of the goals I've got planned, or otherwise. Additionally, if anyone is really interested in tinkering and is able to get here physically with whatever they'd want to use to tinker, I'm all for that. I really want this car to be less of a black box than it is today.
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Edit: At some point my copyrighted externally hosted images were illegally copied from my external hosting and re-hosted directly by TMC without notice or permission. TMC was NEVER given permission to host and distribute my copyrighted images. I've corrected the image references. If my images are appropriated again without my permission I will be forced to take legal action. Unfortunately I can not edit some other posts to correct this, so I will be looking into remedies.
You folks all pretty much know me and my mountain of projects by now. Well, I've added one more to that ever growing list.
Behold! A Model S 17" MCU and IC running on the bench.
And a short video of the minor success and tinkering I've done getting these guys running on the bench:
Tesla Model S Hacking - Running the MCU and IC on the Bench - YouTube
Nothing too exciting just yet, but this is step one for sure.
I sent the video and some pics to a friend earlier and his response was: "I think you might want to go in for service. The car appears to be missing." lol
At this time I've gotten a few things accomplished:
- Figured out the power and ground wires that run the 17", IC, and built in audio amp.
- Figured out the connections between the IC and the MCU.
- There is a CAN pair, an ethernet connection (via that 4-pin connector), and a wake-up signal line
- Wired up a speaker to the center channel.
- The alert noise the car makes can be heard. Music plays via bluetooth. No radio since I don't have the radio module.
- This is a premium audio MCU and actually has line-level outputs for the audio channels as well as amplified outputs... not sure the purpose of the latter in the premium audio setup.
- Figured out how to "press the brake pedal" (or at least tell the IC that's what happened)
So far it's a short list, but I plan on expanding it greatly. Since I have this unit on the bench from a salvage vehicle I have no warranty fears and basically nothing to prevent me from tinkering. If I break it... oh well, I'm not down a vehicle.
Some goals:
- Figure out the rear view camera stuff
- An awesome but pretty unobtrusive hack would be to be able to display whatever we want in the Camera "app".
- I'm envisioning an HDMI aux input port...
- Gain access to the system software
- It's been done, and this unit is on 6.1 still. So, should be possible but I'm not sure. I'm pretty capable. If there is a way in, I'll find it.
- From here, any number of things is possible, and that list is pretty long.
- Hardware mod to take over the display
- A mod to the IC and/or the MCU could potentially allow utilization of the screens by a secondary processor. This could make it so a custom piece of hardware could overlay data on the screens, intercept touch commands if desired, etc, so that the interface can be modified in all sorts of cool ways. The best part about this would be that the hack wouldn't require breaking into the software running on the units, and thus wouldn't mess up any existing functionality or any warranty related things aside from the MCU/IC modifications.
- Find a way to gather and decode technical data about the vehicle
- I have tons of CAN logs from working Model S vehicles. Using my bench setup I could potentially start safely decoding what these commands mean.
- For example, I can playback some of the log to the bench setup and see if there is any result. Like, let's say I have a hunch that a certain packet is telling the battery SoC. Well, I can play that to the bench CAN bus and see if if updates the SoC display.
- I have tons of CAN logs from working Model S vehicles. Using my bench setup I could potentially start safely decoding what these commands mean.
- Hack enough to potentially use these units in an EV conversion project
- Probably ambitious... but have you seen my other projects?
- Probably ambitious... but have you seen my other projects?
Lot's to be done. One of the things I'll need to be able to do is convince this setup to "start" the car. Currently it won't "start" when I "press" the brake pedal since there are a lot of things it can't communicate with. I'm hoping that I can fake it out by playing back portions of CAN logs from actual vehicles and maybe eventually get the IC to the "on" screen. Keep in mind that literally the only things I have hooked up currently are the MCU and IC. No other modules that would sit on the CAN buses. So everything it is displaying about the car (battery SoC, mileage, door positions, etc) is saved and displayed since it is the last thing it saw while it was connected and powered in the actual salvage vehicle.
Essentially one of my main goals with this is to find a way to add functionality to the units one way or another that can be utilized in a working car without causing any major concerns. Additionally I want to get a better understanding of everything that the car does (specifically on the CAN bus and the ethernet connections) to potentially be able to use that info for non-Tesla based diagnostic info and such. For example, I would really love to know what my pack voltage was at any given time, or the numeric power usage value.
Should be fun, and I welcome any insight anyone might have into how to go about some of the goals I've got planned, or otherwise. Additionally, if anyone is really interested in tinkering and is able to get here physically with whatever they'd want to use to tinker, I'm all for that. I really want this car to be less of a black box than it is today.
---
Edit: At some point my copyrighted externally hosted images were illegally copied from my external hosting and re-hosted directly by TMC without notice or permission. TMC was NEVER given permission to host and distribute my copyrighted images. I've corrected the image references. If my images are appropriated again without my permission I will be forced to take legal action. Unfortunately I can not edit some other posts to correct this, so I will be looking into remedies.
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