All Aboard the CAN Bus or Motorcycle
Derrick shares a journey reverse engineering modern motorcycle CAN bus telemetry using custom microcontrollers, pulse-width modulation, and Python to construct an aftermarket digital gauge cluster.
Summary
Motorcycle Electronics and CAN Bus Networks
Modern motorcycles increasingly implement Controller Area Network (CAN) architectures to coordinate engine control modules, ABS sensors, electronic throttles, and dashboard instrument clusters.
Building Custom Hardware and Simulation Fixtures
Derrick presents the hardware tooling required to tap into motorcycle wiring harnesses, combining low-cost microcontrollers, potentiometers, and pulse-width modulation (PWM) circuits to simulate engine RPM and speed signals.
Reverse Engineering CAN Bus Telemetry
The speaker details capturing, filtering, and deciphering proprietary motorcycle CAN packet frames in Python, identifying arbitration IDs and byte offsets for critical sensor telemetry.
Developing an Aftermarket Digital Gauge Cluster
The presentation demonstrates integrating the reversed telemetry stream into custom firmware driving an aftermarket instrument display, showing practical automotive hardware prototyping.
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