RE: CAN Specific Technical Theory Quiz

Hi, was hoping for a bit of clarification on this specific question: "When interfacing with an existing CAN bus to extract specific data, what is the primary challenge compared to setting up communication between known aftermarket devices?"

The accepted answer suggests that programming aftermarket devices "requires advanced coding skills", but my interpretation from the course was that this typically wasn't necessary (unless you're actually developing these devices yourself. But not for installing and implementing them?). Instead, around the 3:43 mark and beyond in the "What is a 'CAN Bus'?" video, it seems the answer the to aforementioned quiz question would be that you typically won't have documentation of existing transmitted data and specific CAN dialect (4:14).

Meanwhile, I don't see in the video transcription any mention of coding.

Looking forward to clarification - thanks!

Disclaimer: I have not viewed the CAN training package.

If I understand your question right.

You don't need to be a programmer / coder per-say.... But it REALLLY IS helpful.

with OEM systems you will not have the "decoder rings" to make sense of the data. this is where reverse engineering and taking and manipulating lots of data logs comes in.

Now some nice tinkerers over at git hub have shared their reverse engineered decoder rings (.DBC files) with this project:

https://github.com/commaai/opendbc

(the files may be geared towards their OPENAi project (autonomous driving for ALL vehicles) vs Motor Sports. but Data is data)

Also modern LLM Ai's have gotten so good, I would not be surprised if you fed them a small table of the CAN logs and some recorded physical data from another device and asked it find the data that you could ask it to find the data and determine the conversion formula.

With aftermarket systems I have seen vendors supply the decoder ring and even a .DBC files for their products.

and Some others where they say they have a can bus interface and that's it.

Now when you want to do more than read the data, (Inject data or change data via man-in-the-middle attack) then yes you will need programming skills.

Almost anyone can become a programmer now with enough time and effort. (it doesn't even cost anything if your persistent! ;-) )

Let me know if you have more questions.