CAT 3208 monitoring

[davidbrady]

Hey Ned,

I need to download a copy of Ray's Techtool to see what's user configurable. I've been using Silverleaf's VMSpc for quite some time now so I'm pretty familiar with it.

In VMSpc, and I imagine in Ray's product too, the user can define new gauges (simple, scan, odometer, transmission indicator, task bar, multiminder, multibar, and histogram). The user can then give the gauge a name, define a PID, and define values (min, max, yellow/redline), and formats, multipliers, and offsets.

For example, I went into VMSpc and I quickly configured an new gauge that I named "Fan Tach", I gave it a range of values, and a PID, and I'm ready to go. I'm satisfied with the level of user customization that VMSpc provides and I think it's adequate.

The issue is whether we can have VMSpc or RV Techtools receive a data stream on a port and not care who the source is. I've had some correspondence with the folks at CANpod and I learned that they do encode their J1578 over UDP/IP. This is great news. As you know, UDP is connectionless, unreliable delivery, so we should be able to intermix our packets with predictable results. Now it depends on the Apple API's that Ray depends upon. Like I said, in unix it's easy to simply ask for all packets on a given UDP port number. I don't know what's required in Apple land, if they negotiate a new port number or if they associate a given port number with the sender's source IP address. Maybe Ray can help here.

I don't see bandwidth or processing power to be an issue. I think a SAN will work great while using almost no bandwidth. I'm envisioning sending PIDs once a second which is incredibly slow. We're only looking to periodically update a user display so anything more than a 1s rate is probably wasteful, and for some sensors we may go even slower than that.

It'd be great to get a copy of the J1578 spec. I may spring for a copy. I'm still confused over MID/PID user defined space, or if it even exists, or what the best way is for us to encode our SANduino!