Nick's Digital Shed

After much research, I managed to track down the Arduino source code from the example project that sparked my interest. It wasn't complete, but it at least gave me some insight into how it is supposed to work. Having coded visual basic to a reasonable level the coding didn't scare me too much, but the language was quite foreign, so it took a bit of time to figure out how to talk to it. To help me understand, I purchased a couple of pre-made projects from skpang.co.uk. One was a CAN bus reader, the other a CAN bus emulator - the plan was to emulate a CAN bus signal, and then write my own code based on the source code I already had to replace that on the reader. Once I had a working model, I could build out from there and add functionality. This took quite a while, and a lot of failing and error messages until finally after about a week I got something to compile. Within a few more attempts I actually got it to work; reading a CAN signal, and displaying it on the OLED di...

Right then, a blog. I have never really been one to write things down, but having recently read a blog featuring the engineering adventures of a friend, I decided that having a go myself might be a nice idea - particularly as I embark on a new project to learn some new skills and realise an idea I have for the centerpiece of my next car project. In the past I've never written things down and months/years down the line I forget what I've done or how I did it, so perhaps this will be a nice chronicle for the future. If it helps a few like minded tinkerers out then all the better! So on to my new project... I have owned my TVR Chimaera for about 13 years this year, and have always been bothered to some degree or other of the little or large niggles with it. TVR of course didn't design a fantastically well engineered car to begin with, and on top of that years of shake rattle and rust generate further work still. Having fixed, upgraded, enhanced and developed the car, ...