Anyone thought of building a connected drive server?

[Xer0449]

@rhodesman it was in the bmwcoding.com thread posted above, not sure which page. I'd be surprised if it works, honestly. Going to need to hack up a cable me thinks :\

 

[rhodesman]

GOOD NEWS!

I was able to successfully connect to my car's FTP& Telnet systems last night!!! I followed a trail of links that was on the BMWCoding site that lead me to a Russian site that had the Ethernet --> OBD schematics...(wait for it)...in German! So after a lot of Google translate, I was able to decipher the problem with my Eth -> OBD cable and it boiled down to one problem: T568A vs. T568B RJ45 wiring standards. Basically this: the Cat5e cable this amazon company used was wired for RJ45-A but they soldered the OBD connection as if it was RJ45-B thus the wrong wires were going to the wrong pins. To help clarify this, please reference this for future wiring needs:

/ -------- KEY ------- \
     ---  : solid wire  
     == : striped wire
\ --------------------- /

--| RJ45 |------------| OBD2 |--
<------------------------------->
--pin1   === Green ===    pin3--
--pin2   --- Green ---    pin11--
--pin3   === Orange ===   pin12--
--pin4   ---  Blue  ---   pin4--
--pin5   ===  Blue  ===   pin5 --
--pin6   --- Orange ---   Pin13--
--Pin7   === Brown ===    N/A--
--Pin8   --- Brown ---    N/A--

NOTE: I miss-read the the schematics and it actually said to terminate the pin4&5 OBD pins to the ethernet sheath but I instead soldered the blue and blue-stripe to those from the ethernet. It didn't have any adverse effects so I left as is.

Now here is the procedure I would take to connect to the car's Network system and keep in mind I tried using my windows laptop that has all the SP-Daten coding software on it but I'm more a Max OS/Linux guy so I ended up using my mac to connect because I have more networking tools installed on it but that does not mean you need a mac, it was just easier for me.

1. On your computer setup a DHCP server to serve IP addresses from the ethernet port. On my mac, I used OS X server (which I use to remote administer my actual mac servers) and turned on the DHCP server serving out through the Thunderbolt->ethernet port. (PRO TIP: New macbooks don't have built in ethernet ports, so you may want to find out which port your computer sees the adaptor on by connecting it to your home router first to see which one becomes active.)
2. Give that ethernet port a static IP address for the port. I choose 192.168.135.1 because 135 and also I have multiple networks at home and didn't want to overlap them by accident. Then a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. the gateway doesn't really matter but you can give it the same as your IP address (mine again: 192.168.135.1). DNS, leave empty.
3. Once that's active, turn on your car to power on (but not the engine) and then, WAIT! This is the biggest distinction, wait for the iDrive to boot up.
4. Plug in the ethernet side of the OBD cable to your computer THEN plug in the OBD side to your car. Within a few seconds your computer should get a DHCP request from the car and it will assign the first IP address in your DHCP range.
5. Ping that IP, if you are getting pings back, you are golden!
6. You can sniff the IP to see what ports are active. there are many apps that can do this, I use nmap in terminal but I got back ports 21(ftp),23(telnet),& 1000 ( --\/-- )
7. It took me a while to figure out the root password but I found this post that had two options, the second one worked for me.
8. user:

   root

   pass:

   cic0803

   OR

   Hm83stN)

9. Profit! You should be in by now!

EDIT For reference:
(looks like this image was removed from it's source. adding a new one)

 

[Xer0449]

Awesome work and even awesome(er?) post. I wish more posts in the community were this informative and technical.

 

[doublespaces]

Great info! So did I miss it or was there a link to this or a different(working) Eth->OBD adapter?

 

[rhodesman]

Great info! So did I miss it or was there a link to this or a different(working) Eth->OBD adapter?

The cable I had to "fix" was this: http://a.co/16to8sn

 

[rhodesman]

For anyone who wants to play around with this but doesn't have (or know how to) solder, PM me. If I can get 10+ people to sign up, I'll ship you out a working e-Net cable for $30 $20 within North America. If you're across the pond(s), let me know your country and I'll see if I need to adjust for any international shipping rates.

EDIT: Dropped the price to $20 because I found the raw materials for far cheaper and have enough extra cat6 cable in my house to circle the world, so F-it, I'll match the amazon cable and personally check/verify each cable with my car before I ship!

 

[doublespaces]

If it was wired incorrectly it may be simpler to try a different cable like this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BKB1HTU/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_WMm-yb5M7HDM6

 

[rhodesman]

If it was wired incorrectly it may be simpler to try a different cable like this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BKB1HTU/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_WMm-yb5M7HDM6

true, but that's an unknown. It took me 5 mins to re-solder the proper connection once I knew what the problem was. That cable is an unknown (to me). Honestly, looks identical to the one I got so aside from saving a couple more bucks, there is nothing to determine if it's right or not without buying it and cracking open the OBD connector.

 

[Xer0449]

What a gentleman, indeed.

I'm pretty darn frightened of bricking my CIC, seems like people seem to break it just by doing mundane stuff. Weird...

 

[doublespaces]

So now that you've got access, what is next?

 

[Xer0449]

So now that you've got access, what is next?

That's a good question. I can't see what @rhodesman can see yet, but perhaps we should discuss end goals and milestones?

 

[rhodesman]

So now that you've got access, what is next?

That's a good question. I can't see what @rhodesman can see yet, but perhaps we should discuss end goals and milestones?

well, funny you should say something, I just posted the contents of the /DEV folder I pulled off my mounted CIC drive to that github repo I shared with earlier. Go check it out and clone/start digging around for yourself!

 

[Xer0449]

I don't see any commits newer than 16 days ago. Is it private?

 

[rhodesman]

I don't see any commits newer than 16 days ago. Is it private?

WHOOPS! My bad, I committed my changes but didn't push them.

 

[Xer0449]

WHOOPS! My bad, I committed my changes but didn't push them.

Well that just sounds frighteningly familiar to my everyday life

 

[Xer0449]

I'm at work. Any chance you can do a 'find /' and post the output? No worries if not.

 

[rhodesman]

I'm at work. Any chance you can do a 'find /' and post the output? No worries if not.

I'm working on setting up a more comfortable access system ATM. It was getting hot and uncomfortable to be sitting in my car, so I'm setting up an old wifi router to be a wifi bridge to my car so I can sit in the A/C and a lounge chair.

 

[rhodesman]

@Xer0449 I updated github with the results. Brace yourself, it's about 37000 lines!!!

 

[rhodesman]

It's not easy to get files recursively. There are a TON of symlinks and doing 'cp -R -L' was not helping much. I'm open to thoughts on a better way to copy it all down.

 

[Xer0449]

Perfect, this is exactly what I wanted to see. Lots of interesting stuff in here. Definitely QNX, which I don't know much about. Going to start looking for some docs on the init process (since I don't see any init scripts).

That's OK, we'll get it. You're trying to pull everything down off the CiC and commit it, or just a more in-depth filesystem map?