The X350 seems the perfect car for this sort of project, as most things can easily be controlled over the can bus, and the old audio can be removed and replaced with a more modern off the shelf system to bring carplay, reversing cameras, and high quality hi-fi. I (like a lot of others i suspect) hate the old system with it's giant buttons and tiny screens - so have been working to modernise this!

My end goal is to have a new climate control system with 3 dials for the climate control (left temp, fan speed & settings, right temp), and then a flush mounted modern screen above - biggest priority is for this to look totally OEM and be easily removable later if needed.

I've completed the reverse engineering of the can bus messages for the climate, and have put together an ESP32 dial to replace the old system which is all working now.

Progress this week was getting a test part 3d printed in carbon fibre to hold the new climate controls as a temporary solution, while i work on the final console (planning to have that in original shiny piano black finish)




You can see an early version of the climate system working here:

 

Todays progress has been hard wiring in a connection to the can bus, rather than picking it up from the OBD2 port which i'd been doing till now - the nearest and most reliable place to pick this up was the j-gate module - i just soldered into the back of the existing connector (IP32 on the XJ X350 electrical guide) and then ran a twisted wire pair and shrink-wrapped it and ran it via the original wire channels to the back of the console.

 

Richard,

I think it's brilliant that you are doing this. You are pioneering the way for people who want to upgrade and keep these wonderful cars on the road for years to come.

Keep us posted

Jeff

 

Why the long waight?
https://zwnav.net/products/12.1-andr...2009-car-radio
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/32568...Cquery_from%3A

 

thanks! Yes i saw that, as well as the JagDroid system - neither quite my cup of tea, don’t love the look of the vertical screen. Mostly this project is fun!

 

Installed one of those flat screens into my 2008 VDP. It works 90% of the time and still has some wonky quirks.

Really interesting project you have going. Will enjoy seeing updates and more details. Good luck.

 

I need to know everything about this, PLEASE!

First would be what is the panel/tablet thing that can be seen here? https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...1/#post2780265
Edit: the unit appears to be Alpine iLX-F115D (11") or iLX-F905D (9"), likely the latter

 

yes it’s an iLX-F509E - 9” absolute biggest screen that will fit inside the centre console trim

ill do a proper write up once I get the last 3d print done this week

 

My burning questions:
1) How do you adjust aspects of the climate control that are not covered by the three knobs? ("Turn on air-recirculation" is one such example coming to my mind.)
2) Have you used a 3d-scanner when modelling the frame/bezel?
3) Are there operations that were available in the factory UI but are NOT available now?

 

So i've built a replacement for the climate control, you can see in this picture here it has three dials (left temp, fan + other controls, right temp) and it talks directly to the car via CAN bus - this way can use an aftermarket head unit but retains all the original controls including the screen heaters front + rear etc.

I'm just 3d printing the final piece to hold it all and (hopefully!) look as close to OEM as possible

 

Damn, only now I noticed this part! For me this is the most interesting bit.
Like ten years ago I started a very naďve attempt at exactly that with a different car. The idea was to use an Arduino to read the CAN-bus messages, display them on an old Android tablet in real time, and thus "identify" which button does what. But my Android visualizer app kept freezing (probably overloaded with all the messages), and then my stock head-unit died (unrelated) and suddenly it made sense just to buy a whole new (Android based) head-unit from AliExpress. Which rendered the project pointless.

When you're done with the printing part I would love to know please:
- how have you decoded the CAN-bus messages? 😳
- do you have a custom Android app/UI that replaces the original 2003 Jaguar UI?

 

Turns out there's actually handful of tools for exactly that.
(I wonder what the situation was those 7 years ago when I was torturing myself with Arduino. Maybe I simply wasn't googling properly back then.)
Anyways, looking forward to your story!

 

Protocol Analyzer capability was 'out there' a great deal more than seven years ago!


Cost at the time?

Dunno.

'Usta bee' all this stuff was so costly AND.. had such a short service-life .... due to rapid advances in technology, that even "the majors" leased or rented more of the test and analytical equipment than they owned.

Last Protocol Analyzer I signed-off on was from Hewlett-Packard and cost over $12,000 late 1980's dollars. Even so, it was cheaper than rentals.

NOW so much of it is "software defined" the hardware has gone very VERY cheap. "Open Source" has even made the software free or nearly so.

 

So i just dumped all the messages on the network out and watched for changes in the values as i moved the climate control around - pretty quickly worked out the device IDs for the climate.

However the tricky thing is the original screen talks via the SCP network to the instrument cluster which is the network gateway between the SCP and CAN networks and repeats through the Audio network - so to make things really easy, just unplug everything in the trunk as it won't be able to interfere with your messages.

Once i had all the messages it was just a case of working out what it was saying. So as an example one of the messages it would transmit on can would be something like - which was pretty confusing to start with because small changes in the climate (ie going from 20 to 21) would completely change the message, however what i realised was that converting from the hex to binary things make much more sense.

So for example going from 20 to 21 on the temperature in the climate (in celcius), the 3rd segment in the message changed from C7 to C9 - which made no sense initially, but converting that to decimal it goes from 11000111 to 11001001. - What i realised is the format is a set of groups of decimal numbers, so the temperature is the last 5 digits of that third segment. The cars network defines temperature as an integer between 0 (LO) and 31 (HI), so 20 on the screen is actually 7 internally (ie 111 in decimal), changing the climate up to 21 on the screen changes the value to 9 (ie 1001 in decimal) - So the climate takes all the various components / settings / values in decimal, converts them to binary, 0 pads them so that each is a defined length, then effectively smushes them all together into one log hex string. Once i knew how the X350 message formats worked it was just a slog to work out exactly how everything was represented.

I didn't have any fancy software though.... i did it mostly in my head thinking about it at 2am / with pen & paper / in excel - perhaps there was an easier and more sophisticated way i didn't know about? but it was fun to reverse engineer the format manually!

 

Didn't you use something to see the messages in real-time as you were turning knobs?
I mean the bus seemed busy as hell to me (08 Mondeo), so it wasn't like "if I don't touch anything there will be silence", hence looking into an offline log-file seemed sub-optimal, to put it mildly... A live-sheet with 1 row per each device-id detected was something I was trying to write. That way I would be able to notice a row that keeps changing consistently with me touching something in the car.
(Looking back and pondering why the thing kept freezing on me, I don't know if the bottleneck was the Arduino being too slow or my way of rendering the rows in the live-sheet was too demanding for the old Android tablet I used... Maybe I was scanning the wrong bus.)

So if I get it right, there are 'non-interesting' messages coming from the audio devices in the trunk and those are allowed to the CAN-bus because of the SCP between the IC and the head-unit?

Do you have a business plan based on this knowledge or would you be okay with sharing the map?

 

Wow! Looks very fresh and more harmonical than chinese approach. However why you did not choose a modern android head with universal screen + can-bus box instead of outdated standalone design alpine for cost of fortune?) I see that 10,36inch could be used easily and even 11.5inch could be sqeesed horisontally.. Sorry if that was covered erlier.

PS I wonder if F-type's climate control panel could be used in your scenario..

 

Let's see if I guess the right answer for @richard.wyke , probably not
1) Is there a CAN-Bus box for x350/x358?
2) The bezel of the Alpine IMO suits the dashboard better thanks to its slightly curved edges...?

Following is me half-guessing, I am still trying to clear things out about this topic:
Regular Android no longer features the Handsfree Bluetooth profile (see this post on SO), which I believe is the reason why it is not possible to make calls through a regular tablet (or Jagaux or Jagdroid) despite it being paired & connected to a smartphone buried somewhere in your handbag.
I would love to have this feature in an Android head-unit. (Or one would have to build his own Android, which is not impossible of course.)

 

I really seriously looked at the various Chinese headunits, and absolutely they would have had a bigger size with smaller bezels to maximise screen real estate, not to mention they're much much cheaper, however:

• The original system was Alpine, so to be honest the main decision was swayed by having matching logos on the dashboard and the speakers on the door 😅
• I've come to really like the proportions of the Alpine screen in the dash, i think it looks great now
• I read lots of horror stories and in-depth reviews about the audio quality / units dying and sound quality was one of my main priorities - the quality of the alpine unit is great, nice graphics, carplay super responsive, phone just works, and the sound even out of the onboard amp is a big jump from the factory

Also as mentioned, no out of the box canbus solution and part of this was just to have a fun project and replace the climate system

Re the f-type dials, you're absolutely right! I'm sure that they fit almost perfectly in the space AND have all the right buttons (the warning triangle would be repeated but could find a solution to that) - i was looking for ages for a cheap one on eBay that i could play with but couldn't bring myself to spend €200 on something that might not work, the dials were $30~ each - which saved some money for the alpine! man maths at work.

As an aside, I ordered a 3d printer on the weekend (Bambu P1S) and have been playing with different materials and designs for the console - bit of trial and error to get the prints reliable

 

Just a brief response;
1. I retrofitted a Chinese Tesla-style large format head unit over a year ago. I won't repeat what I reported on numerous other threads in this forum, however, after 6k miles both long and short trips, I've been really pleased and zero glitches once I fitted proper launcher (Nova). And sound using DSP is far superior to the original premium (separate trunk amp) OEM. Maybe cause my brand was AOSTR?

2. Reverse engineering CANBus messages - there are lots of commercial tools for doing this, with the emphasis on data acquisition, analysis, and export. I.E.; https://www.csselectronics.com/pages...rd-open-source . CSS has well-engineered products. As an alternative, you could use the open source BUSMASTER - the price is right (). https://rbei-etas.github.io/busmaster/. Phytools has everything CAN - at a price . https://phytools.com/collections/pea...dX9l--ytVooSH8

3. I believe almost all the Chinese retrofits use the exact same CANbus module. Whoever actually engineered it did their homework - you could see if you could wheedle one of them into selling you just the CANBus interface module?

 

Hell of a great job here Rich, if you packaged and sold the solution I'd definitely consider buying it, if only we could get the knobs to be wood paneled haha. Curious as to how you manage the other climate controls like airflow direction and re-circulation namely.