Presse-Information Honda Insight
Ich hatte das Glück, eine originale Presse-Informationsmappe über den Honda Insight aus dem Jahr 2000 zu bekommen. Hier möchte ich gerne die Scans und den Inhalt der CD allen Enthusiasten zur Verfügung stellen.
“On Error Resume Next” and how it solves a…
An old, nowadays almost forgotten programming language, Visual Basic, features an mechanism called “On Error Resume Next”: if you add this instruction to your code, it will instruct the program to continue its execution, no matter what happened. You accidentally do a division by zero? No problem, just continue. You write outside of a buffer? Oh well, maybe it works next time. As an experienced programmer, I nowadays joke about this feature, and occasionally bring it up as a possible solution when I join a bug-fixing task force at work.
Now, joking about the silliness of this expression aside, I remember how frequently I used it when I started learning programming. Back then, in middle school, I didn’t learn programming because I was interested in machine code or how CPUs work. I wanted to program cool games, that are fun to play, and impress my classmates! I didn’t care how the code look, as long as I got some awesome looking results quickly. Having to learn a programming language was a necessity to achieve this goal, but not necessarily fun by itself.
Reflecting about my attitude back then got me thinking that this is exactly the problem many people face when they want to learn programming. The frustration about code not running because of inexplicable error messages causes large portions of interested students to give up. Nowadays, I try to write super efficient, thread-safe fail-safe code, with rollback mechanisms and apply every pattern I’ve learned about reliable code – writing perfect code. That is not what you want to achieve as a newcomer. As a starter in the world of programming, you need satisfying moments. Improving your code quality comes later.
The things that burned into my mind from my first programming steps were not about efficient code, but seeing the machine doing what I wanted it to do: the first time the screen turned black when the DirectX 2D engine took over and bit-blitted a paint-drawn bitmap all over the screen was exciting. The first time OpenGL rendered a rotating teapot was. Getting some music playing out of the speakers was. Struggling over copied-together code from tutorials was not.
The thing is that, as a fresh starter, you usually have no understanding of computer science at all. To get an understanding on how a computer works, one of the most important steps every programmer novice has to overcome is to understand the fundamental differences between human communication, and communication to a machine. If you talk to a human, and forget a few words, or put the words in the wrong order, chances are high that your counterpart is still able to guess what you meant. This ability is fundamental in human communication, and we rely on it everyday. A computer doesn’t do that, and learning this logical strictness of a programming language is both frustrating and challenging.
“On Error resume next” was a big help for me to get started with programming, and a powerful ally in fighting the strict logic of a computer. How did my first steps look like back them? I connected the modem to the phone line, dialed into CompuServe, and looked up some Visual Basic forums for tutorials. After downloading them quickly, I had to disconnect the modem to avoid getting scolded for blocking the phone line. I then spend several hours trying to get these tutorials running, and modifying them. In most cases, this didn’t work out of the box. The program crashed due to an integer overflow – how was I supposed to understand that? I noted it down on the things to look up the next time I would go online, and added an “On Error Resume Next” instruction. With a engulfing feeling of satisfaction, I watched my game running stable now.
Digital Cluster Conversion Kit Launch!
I am pleased to announce that for the Nissan Rz1 digital cluster conversion kit project, all development and testing steps are complete. The product will be launched in April 2021.
To put it simply, this kit allows you to put the JDM digital cluster into your US/European Nissan Rz1, without having to cut any cables or complex rewiring. No hard-to-find special speed sensor or fuel sensor are required.
For DIY enthusiasts, all technical documents, PCB layouts, part lists and 3D printing components will be made available soon. The firmware of the conversion ECU is already open source.
It will contain the following parts:
As you can see from the pictures, it is a complete plug&play solution, which can be installed without having to cut connectors, or rewire your vehicle cable loom. The adapter can be fully removed; and the factory cluster reinstalled.
Basically, the only wiring step necessary is to connect battery supply, ground, and accessories.
The kit will only work on specific left-hand driven Nissan Rz1 models.
My Fuel Saver Car: Honda Insight ZE1
After driving my Nissan Sunny B12 Coupés for a while, I felt I needed something more environment-friendly, and a bit safer. From my work, I had the opportunity to drive the latest-model Toyota Prius as a test car. Most car enthusiasts would consider it boring. I, however, loved the technical details this car had to offer. Driven properly, you could easily reduce your fuel consumption to 3.3l/100km. An impressive value for a sedan!
Hence, I decided I need a similar fuel efficient vehicle myself. My search started right at spritmonitor.de, a German platform where users document their fuel consumption records. The website allows filtering the fuel consumption records by the most fuel efficient vehicles, and the first entry in the list surprised me. It was not a Toyota Prius, as I would have thought. It was a car that so far has completely evaded my attention. A Honda Insight.
The record displayed a fuel consumption of less than 3l/100km, a value which I considered to be almost unobtainable without a plug-in possibility. Even stranger, it was a car built in 2000! How can such an old car achieve such numbers? Read on.
Doing my research, I learned that in the early 2000, under pressure from threatening US enivornmental laws, Honda built a car with the goal of reducing emissions as much as possible. That car was not designed by the marketing department. It was a product made by engineers, without compromises, or cutting corners to reduce costs. Just looking at it in detail, you could feel how the hard-working Japanese engineers in the late 90ies did everything possible to build a revolutionary car. Below is a list of features that the little Insight has to offer:
- full aluminium monocoque, total weight of the complete car of just about 850kg
- 3cylinder 1L engine
- lean-burn operation
- NOx-trap type catalysator
- super-lightweight aluminium wheels
- 144V NiMh battery pack with battery management system, thermal monitoring, over/undercharge protection
- A ultra-slim 10kW brushless DC motor, mounted on the crankshaft
You really have to give Honda credit for investing so much R&D effort into building this car. I mean, how was this possible back in the late 90ies? People were still struggling with Windows 95 bluescreens every day, and, unlike today, electric drivedrains were neither famous nor popular.
Long story short, these technical details fully convinced me, and I had to get one of these fascinating two-seaters. Unfortunately, Honda did not sell many of these in the old country, especially not in Germany, where at bak in the early 2000s clean Diesel engines were regarded the future of Automotive. Only about 100 of these little cars made their way to customers here.
Now, I have to say that an ecologial lifestyle is very important for me. I value it much higher if someone fixes something that breaks, instead of just buying new. I apply the same principle to cars, and tend to buy the kind of cars that other people would simply scrap, and then invest tons of effort to bring them to life again.
That’s what happened here as well. It looked bad.
Very bad.
Noone with a clear mind would have brought that car back to life.
My appologies for the pictures. As a student, I only had a very basic smartphone, with a pretty bad camera.
How did I bring that car back on the road? You’ll read this in part two of this article (coming up)!
How to Implement 3D Object Triangle Selection?
keywords: 3D geometry; triangle selection; vertex selection;
When developing 3D software, you might want to allow the user to select specific polygons or vertices from your 3D model. Different parts of the geometry, such as corner points (vertices), triangles or surface normals must be selectable just by clicking on them. The complicated part is not only to calculate the right geometry entity which is currently selected by the mouse cursor, but also to do it fast enough. It must be possible to find the selected object in real-time to allow hovering. If the mouse is moved over the object, the software should give a visual feedback to the user by highlighting the currently hovered entity.
With the method presented here, you can implement a selection algorithm for the following 3D geometry entitites:
- Surface point
- Surface normal
- Vertices
- Edges
- Triangles
- Whole entities
One possibility to solve this issue is to calculate the solution manually using mathematics. By taking the current mouse cursor position and unprojecting it in 3D space using the inverse of the projection matrix and calculating the first intersection with a geometric entity, the solution can be found. However, this method is computation intensive, slow and cumbersome.
Luckily, it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel as already existing technologies can be used for this purpose. The OpenGL library supports rendering into back buffers, which means that the results are not visible to the user (off-screen rendering). To solve the problem of selection, the current view of the object is rendered into a back buffer using a special color coding method. In this selection rendering mode, lighting and geometry shading is disabled and the colors of the objects are defined by the programmer. Selectable objects are displayed in unique colors, while the background and non-selectable geometries are rendered in black. To find the geometric entity which is currently selected, a small part of the back buffer around the mouse cursor position is copied and the closest non-black color value is searched. The correspondence between the color code and the information of the selected element is determined by a lookup table. With this method, a hardware accelerated selection mechanism can be easily implemented. The picture above shows an image of this off-screen selection rendering. This method is sufficient for most geometric entities; however, some minor problems must be tackled with. If a vertex (a corner point of a triangle) is to be selected, it must be ensured that all vertices which are not visible due to occlusion, such as points on the backside of the object, are hidden. This is done by not only rendering the vertices with their unique color value, but also by rendering the whole geometry in the back buffer using black color. The depth-test of the video cards depth buffer will then automatically discard hidden points, making their selection impossible.
Another problem is to find the surface point on the geometry. In this selection mode, not the vertices of the triangle are to be selected, but the exact coordinates that are currently hovered by the mouse need to be known. While this case is less relevant for geometries with a dense triangle mesh, it becomes more important if the mesh is very sparse and only consists a few triangles. A large cube is an example of such geometry – due to the planarity of the surfaces, only very few triangles are necessary to generate the surface. To calculate the exact coordinates of the surface point currently hovered by the mouse, the color-keying method cannot be used. For this method, the solution is to render the geometry in the back buffer and then read the value of the depth buffer (z buffer) of the video card at the current mouse cursor position. This depth value can then be used to unproject the current surface point by inverse-multiplying the projection matrix and the extrinsic transformation to receive the coordinates of this point in the CAD model frame.
Honda CRZ ZE2 CAN Bit Assignment Sheet
A while ago I hooked a CAN logger to a friends CRZ, and reverse-engineered it a bit. Hope it helps for your projects 😉
Vehicle CAN
| Message ID | Bit | Length | Description |
| 0x13F | 8 | 16 | ThrottlePosition raw |
| 0x13F | 40 | 32 | ThrottlePosition counter |
| 0x164 | 0 | 8 | Headlight switch |
| 0x164 | 48 | 16 | Vehicle speed |
| 0x17C | 24 | 16 | Engine RPM |
| 0x191 | 1 | 1 | Transmission reverse SW |
| 0x191 | 2 | 1 | Transmission neutral SW |
| 0x374 | 32 | 8 | Trunk open |
| 0x136 | 8 | 8 | VTEC SW |
| 0x136 | 0 | 8 | fuel cutoff |
IMA CAN
| Message ID | Bit | Length | Description |
| 0x111 | 8 | 16 | IMA Motor RPM |
| 0x169 | 8 | 16 | IMA motor current (mA) |
| 0x231 | 24 | 16 | IMA SOC |
“Can not find free FPB Comparator!” when using OpenOCD…
The last two days, I had a very interesting problem that I thought is worth sharing. I am developing a project on an STM32 microcontroller. My toolchain uses Eclipse, which uses GDB, which in turn controls OpenOCD, which does all the low-level stuff so that I can flash and debug. That worked very well for a long time. Until yesterday.
What did I do? I added a new class to my project, which at some point would be dynamically allocated. I kept the method bodies all empty, so nothing should happen. But after flashing the code to the target, the debugger crashed with the message:
Can not find free FPB Comparator!
can’t add breakpoint: resource not available
This error message was already familiar to me – it usually happens when you have too many breakpoints listed in Eclipse, and when you start the debug session, it will automatically add all these breakpoints. If you have listed more breakpoints than the MCU supports (six), this message appears. But here, my breakpoint list was completely empty.
Strange! I had no idea what was going on here, so my first trial and error approach was to reduce the flash and RAM footprint of my app, but even after implementing some optimizations here and there, the problem remained the same. The fun fact was that if I commented out that class, debugging worked again! But once my class was back, even with empty function bodies, the debugger stopped working!
So I decided to have a closer look. Using the telnet interface of OpenOCD, I was able to halt and continue the MCU, so debugging in general was technically still working. Reading and writing from and to memory was also working.
After reading a lot about the FPB, I understood a bit better how this works: The Flash Patch and Breakpoint (FPB) unit is a set of registers of the ARM MCU, which consists of several comperators – one for each breakpoint. Each comperator basically stores one program ( FP_COMPx). If the currently executed address matches what is written inside this register, the execution will be stopped and you can debug.
So I decided to have a look at the hardware registers itself. Since I couldn’t use Eclipse for debugging anymore, I had to use Telnet. If you have an OpenOCD server running, it will listen on port 4444 for a telnet connection. Via this connection, I was able to read out the memory of the FPB registers, located at address 0xE0002000:
mdw 0xe0002000 20
0xe0002000: 00000261 20000000 48001239 4800164d 480019b1 480021a1 48005d0d 48006851
0xe0002020: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
0xe0002040: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
Starting from the third register (0x48001239), there is a list of six registers filled with some addresses. That explains the error that we see from OpenOCD, the questio now is, who is writing to these registers?
A lot of further research revealed me that it is possible to open OpenOCD in debug mode, by passing parameter “-d3” to it. This even works in Eclipse:
With this additional debug output, I could actually see what secretly happens after flashing. I saw about six of these blocks:
Debug: 17205 11732 gdb_server.c:3153 gdb_input_inner(): received packet: ‘m8001238,2’
Debug: 17206 11732 gdb_server.c:1438 gdb_read_memory_packet(): addr: 0x0000000008001238, len: 0x00000002
Debug: 17207 11732 target.c:2210 target_read_buffer(): reading buffer of 2 byte at 0x08001238
Debug: 17208 11732 hla_target.c:777 adapter_read_memory(): adapter_read_memory 0x08001238 2 1
This is actually the part where the breakpoints were set, and I could see the breakpoints were actually explicitly requested by someone! But why? And why on earth would Eclipse set so many breakpoints? I decided to check the addresses in the Linker file.
The locations usually looked somewhat like this:
All of these blocks somehow had a function with the string “main”, and it was the same case with my recently added C++ class, which also had a member function named “main”. That was when I understood, that Eclipse automatically sets a breakpoint at main() after startup! And for some reasons, it is setting this breakpoint also to classes that have a member function with the name main. It was just because I added one more class with a “main” function, that the number of possible breakpoints was exceeded, and the debugger wouldn’t work anymore.
You could debate if it is good style to have functions named “main” in your code. For me, it was OK because they are not only class members, but also somewhere in their own namespace, and should therefore be restricted. Turns out this was not always the case.
So if you encounter this problem, make sure to reduce the number of functions named “main” in your system!
Building a Digital Cluster Converter
Today I would like to share some exciting news for you, and make it official – I am building a converter to allow you to fit a digital cluster into your eighties oldschool vintage car!
In the last few months, I published details on how the digital cluster in a Nissan Sunny B12 Rz-1 works, and how it is integrated into the vehicle electronics. Well knowing that even with the information available, most owners of these old cars would not be able to do the job themselves, I decided to start building an adapter.
So how’s the idea?
Having solved all the big questionmarks around the digital cluster was not sufficient. From knowing how the speed sensor signal looks like (0-5V PWM), or how the fuel sensor of the digital cluster works, to have a digital cluster successfully installed in your car, is a long way to go. That’s why I decided to build you guys a simple, plug-and-play conversion. The idea is that with my kit you just install a different speed sensor, attach my harness to the one already installed in the car, and connect it to your digital cluster. No hassle, no removal of the dashboard, no cutting of wires, no soldering.
The heart of the conversion is a little, custom made ECU based on an STM32 microcontroller. This chip will do the math, and adapt the signals that we provide to it to a format that the original Sunny Rz1 digital cluster will understand. It will basically work as a translator between the electrical signals of your car and the digital cluster.
That solution means that you don’t have to bother anymore to find a Nissan Rz1 JDM digital speed sensor or aquire a fuel level sensor from a model with a digital dash – if you own these parts, consider yourself lucky, as these are pretty much Unobtanium.
In more detail, the ECU will convert the vehicle speed signal from a sensor that fits mechanically onto the Rz1 transmission (see the black round thingy in the picture). It gives out 4 pulses per rotation – but the digital cluster needs 24 pulses per rotation! To solve this, the ECU is constantly monitoring the frequency of the vehicle speed sensor, and multiplies this frequency by 8 – and then gives this signal to the digital cluster.
For the fuel signal, the ECU does a similar job: A ADC (analog-digital-converter) measures the fuel quantity in your car, and uses a lookup table to calculate the fuel output level. Say for example, the analog fuel sensor measures 50Ohms, then the ECU knows that this corresponds to a fuel level of 30%. Using the lookup table of the digital cluster, it then translates this fuel level to a voltage: Say that 30% means a fuel signal of 2.1V, then the ECU will provide a 2.1V signal to the cluster, which will then display the correct fuel quantity of 30%.
Some geeky technical details — the STM32 has 256k flash and 64k RAM. The application uses a FreeRTOS operating system. Four different tasks manage the signal conversion, and a serial UART interface allows you to print debug information or change settings. The conversion factors and lookup tables are stored in a data flash.
But having an ECU to convert the signals is not enough, as it would still mean that you would have to spend hours and hours removing your vehicles’ dashboard, cluster, harness, cut wires, solder, measure… it can easily take several weeks to accomplish this. I asked myself, how is it possible to make the installation as easy as possible, so that basically everyone can do it?
The idea that popped into my mind was to build an adapter wire harness, which plugs into the OEM harness, and changes the pinout. On the other side of the adapter harness, you can directly connect your cluster. The biggest obstacle here is that the cluster connectors in the Rz1 are 30 years old, and there’s no place on earth were you can buy a matching female connector. I searched for days. You just can’t.
So that basically means that if you want to install a digital cluster, you have to cut off the original connectors, and solder everything together?
You don’t.
After giving up searching a suitable connector that plugs into the OEM harness, I decided to build my own. Above is the CAD drawing of it, and if you scroll all the way up to the picture, you can see the 3D printed result cases. Take two more custom-made electrical PCB circuits and a strain relief, and voilà – your custom made electrical connector is completed!
The custom made PCB will serve as the electrical connection. The cables are soldered to the PCB, and then slid into the 3D printed case, where they are secured. The connector can directly connect to the Rz1 harness, without any cutting required! Compare the gray plug cases with the electrical connector that came from a junkyard Sunny B12 – they will perfectly lign up.
The adapter is now in the late stages of development. The custom plugs are made, the PCB layout for the ECU is done, the software is about 80% complete, next up follows making a prototype and a test installation in a Nissan Rz1. After extensive testing, I hope I can offer you this adapter for sale within one or two month.
What will it cost?
Considering the effort that it took to write the code, design PCBs, the costs for custom PCBs and 3D printing, doing all the research on the Rz1 digital wire harness, measuring out a complete Rz1 harness from Russia, and trying out a lot of different approaches, development of this adapter had cost me a lot. The fact that the number of potential buyers will certainly be less than ten, will not help me a lot either. I am targeting a sales price of roughly 450€ per complete converter, including speed sensor, adapter harness, and custom made ECU. If you are on a tight budget, all the schematics and drawings will be published after the project was completed, so that you can also build everything yourself.
That being said, thank you for reading and the interest! Have fun keeping your old cars on the road, and make sure to come back regularly to find out about updates on this project!
By the way, for all the software guys and girls among you, feel free to check out my GitHub, you will find the complete source code for the adapter there. I will probably do another blog post which focusses only on the software parts, so stay tuned!
Nissan Sunny B12 Rz-1 Digital Speed Sensor
Today I finally managed to measure the signals on the digital speed sensor. I don’t own any of the Rz-1 digital cluster parts, but luckily, a friend borrowed me his sensor and allowed me to reverse-engineer it.
The speed sensor has a connector with three pins: black (right), yellow (middle), red (left).
Based on what I measured, black is GND, red is +5V supply, and yellow is the speedometer signal. The based on my scope prints, it seems that per revolution of the speedo cable we can see 24 pulses:
When I rotate the pin of the speed sensor at about one revolution per two seconds, the cluster shows me – very roughly – 13 km/h.
When only connecting the +5V and GND, but leaving the signal pin open. the signal looks idential. When rotating the pin of the sensor, the 5V pulses on the signal line are still visible.
Therefore, it seems we can just use a 0-5V PWM, and bring it onto the cluster, and it should display the speed signal.
Honda Insight ZE1 OBDII Smartphone App
I’ve been using Peters OBDII C&C for quite a while now, and while I like it’s features, it lacks the intuitiveness of a modern smartphone app. So I thought it’s about time to improve this!
System Architecture
Two MCUs are working together to read the OBDII data from the car, and transmit it vie BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). The data is transmitted to the smartphone, where it is visualized.
The two controllers are one PIC and one ESP32, the PIC is programmed by Peter, and used to interface the OBD, while the ESP32 is programmed by me, used for forwarding the data to the smartphone.
Both MCUs communicate via UART.
See a first running demo of it here: