Does anyone happen to have a CAN template for the Cayman S (987) for the various ECU channels?

 

 

My GT4 has two CAN taps in it now to get the most interesting information out of it. There are apparently five separate CAN buses: Drive, Comfort, Chassis, Man Machine Interface (aka Display), and Crash. I have taps into Chassis and MMI. The majority of useful messages are on the Chassis CAN but one or two interesting things like TPMS pressures (_and_ internal tire air temperatures, btw) come from the MMI CAN. Some of these buses carry duplicates of traffic on the other ones (think: messages originate on one CAN but are consumed by controller units on another one so there's a gateway to pass along from source to destination); that's why Chassis is better than Drive because it has most of the good stuff from Drive and other things besides. OBD II dosen't get you much by comparison.

I haven't worked with Joe but I have spent time with Chris Brown digging through this stuff. I'm a computer professional and I'd count myself pretty expert at firmware and network protocols but I'd say decoding the message traffic beyond the very basics is for practical purposes only possible for someone that has access to Porsche documentation for this stuff. Chris has a set of (proprietary to him) templates that he adapted to work really well on my GT4 -- you can see a pretty good representation of the data you can get with his templates here. The GT4 is a little different here and there to the point some live debugging was required to get things working. He graciously spent several hours with me on Skype dumping CAN traffic, decoding it and reworking templates to get it all going; including a couple of "live tests" with me putting the vehicle in motion while capturing the CAN traffic and doing my best to stay in WiFi range to maintain the voice connection for us. Which is by way of saying Chris has a pretty good handle on setting this stuff up and getting it working from 1000's of miles away. Can't recommend him highly enough: super knowledgeable and ultra helpful.

As a result I have more channels now than I could reasonably make use of most of the time but it's fun to dig. I do appreciate things like seeing the traces for all the nannies though: that's actually pretty enlightening to see when those system flick on and off -- a more reliable guide of when one ends up leaning on those than the dashboard idiot light (...which it appears does not always light up when things like TC and ESC reach in for very short bursts).

 

chris brown and joe hullet are the gurus of the motec world. i ve worked with both. both as 5 star top quality as they come. ive had more face and phone time with motec joe hullet but brown was outstanding as well, and those two, from what i gather are as good as it gets. whenever i need some qwerky harness to connect ie some motec thing to some car, they crank up a harness in a blink, its always right, they walk you through it, and you come away wishing all vendors were as accurate.
so its safe to say, im a fan of them.

here's joe's email overboost@earthlink.net

 

One more vote for either Joe or Chris, both experts with Motec!

 

 

 

Chris is awesome! Glad it's all worked out.