User:K moreno/ENES-100/project 3

Week1 Narrative
Task: Survey cars in a local junkyard for cars that can potentially contain a CAN Bus.

Went to Crazy Ray's junkyard and did a quick run through of the 1500 cars on the lot. Looked for vehicles that were produced after 1996 and had its electronic circuitry in good shape.

A CAN Bus will cost around $40 at Crazy Ray's. There is no way of knowing how long these cars will stay in the junkyard or if the electrical components will remain untouched. Advance Auto Parts does not sell CAN Bus systems.

Next Steps:
 * Go back to Crazy Ray's to salvage the electrical components of one of these cars.
 * Find a CAN Bus in other technologies and hack it.

Week2 Narrative
Task: Retrieve a working CAN Bus system from a local junkyard.

Went to Crazy Ray's junkyard to salvage electrical components from the cars I found last week. Crazy Ray's does not give receipts so could not do anything there. Went to Europarts Express and purchased used parts that may have working CAN Bus systems.

Next Steps: Take apart both power seat and fuse box in search of a CAN Bus system.

Week3 Narrative
Tasks: Disassemble the fuse box and power seat.

Looking for anything CAN Bus in either of the two parts. The electrical components of both were incased so they had to be uncovered to fully see what they contained.

Next Steps: Search for a wiring diagram for the seat or map out all of the wires myself. Try to connect an arduino to the circuit board and try to find each wires' function.

Week4 Narrative
Task: Get the power seat to function again.

In order to find which wire controlled which motor, all the tubing needed to be removed to see wire paths. Proceeded to disconnecting and labeling all of the plugs from the motors and circuit board to make it easier to follow wire paths.

Orientation of the plugs and motors is if the power seat was laying on its back

After labeling finished, showed that all of the thicker wires controlled the motors and thinner wires received the input commands from the seat adjustment nobs and the electricity to power the circuit board. Also evident that each motor was controlled using two relays. Still not clear which wire controlled the function of which motor.

Conducted an extensive search in the internet for a wiring diagram. Diagrams were available, however almost all of them required payment in order to view it. workshop-manuals.com had pictures of wiring diagrams for free. Wiring diagram for power seat on pages 7928-7941.

Discovered that there were two ground wires to the power seat. The thick white wire with a black stripe and the brown wire. This allowed to do more testing.

Steps Taken:


 * Had to use two sets of alligator clips to connect the two ground wires to the negative end
 * Connected the rest of the wires to the two positive clips
 * Worked at first but did not have a full motion and circuit board buzzed when it couldn't go any further
 * Circuit board started making a clicking noise and it started smoking
 * Immediately disconnected power source and gave time for circuit board to cool down
 * Instead of connecting all of the wires to the positive clip, only connected one wire at a time
 * Thick blue wire with white stripe, motors worked except to adjust seat height
 * White wire with red stripe and black wire with red stripe only caused circuit board to make a short buzz noise
 * Rest of wires do not have any reaction

Video demonstration of which wires caused a reaction to the power seat after circuit board started smoking. Circuit board smoking incident probably caused the seat height adjustment to stop functioning

Next Steps: Connect arduino to the circuit board and try to get it to work all the motors individually. Take apart seatbelt lock housing to see if there is anything CAN Bus related.

Week5 Narrative
Task: Take apart seat belt lock housing. Put away power seat.

Seat belt plug had three wires coming from it. Only one wire did not lead to the power seat ECU, which was the white with black stripe wire. That wire most likely led to the dashboard ECU to toggle the seatbelt light. Proceeded in taking apart the housing to find anything CAN Bus related.


 * Detached seat belt lock from seat frame
 * No clear way to take apart housing
 * Began to tear the plastic housing off of the internal components
 * Could see the red release button, locking mechanism, and a small green plate
 * The three ends of the wires ran across the green plate once he seat belt was inside the seat belt lock

There seemed to be no CAN Bus components inside the seat belt lock. Could not take off the red release button without potentially damaging the green board that was providing the wires with seat belt locking input.

Detached back frame from the seat frame in the power seat to be able to store away for the semester.

Next Steps:
 * Connect arduino to Jetta ECU to find out its functions.
 * Use CAN Bus to connect Jetta ECU and Lexus power seat position control module and get it to work together.