Any of you owners of older RVs/Motorhomes/School Buses, Trucks, Bulldozers(?) have insight into dongles or hardware devices to read J1587/J1708 signals? My RV has a 6-pin Deutsch connector rather than OBD2, and J1708/1587 is apparently an RS-485 (NOT CAN)- based protocol. For cars, there are tons of cheap OBD2 CAN dongles as well as lots of reader/interpreter software, but I haven’t found anything cheap or free for J1587/1708.
I’m looking for both hardware (dongle/interface) and reader software to see if I can get any data out at all before I tackle integrating with RealDash. Anyone have any finds?
For anyone else looking to connect to heavy equipment, let me share what I’ve learned so far: “Heavy equipment” means anything, well, heavy, including larger RVs, Trucks, Buses, Tractors, Construction Equipment, even Yachts apparently. There are two (that I know of) standards: J1708/J1587 and J1939. J1939 is the newer (introduced 2001), CAN-based standard, and it (1939) should be as simple to integrate as any other new vehicle manufacturer.
J1708/1587 is the older predecessor to J1939, and as such it is NOT CAN-based, hence my question. The good news for both standards, however is that all the data in them is standardized - i.e. heavy equipment manufacturers learned from the fragmentation of data amongst car manufacturers (thay all implemented their own proprietary standards), and agreed to all use the same signals/messages/frames (still learning that part), so that once you can get RPM or Vehicle Speed or whatever for, say, Freightliner, you also have it for every other brand - Caterpillar, Peterbilt, Mack, Kenworth etc etc
Any news on this? I have a 2001 bus sit ha Detroit 60 and while I thought I made the cut off for the j1939, apparently not… I’ve done all the physical work to the dash in hopes I’d figure something out by now. Still haven’t. Would love to learn more and be able to get this protect on the road!
No, sorry. Heavy equipment has been somewhat out of scope for us. If anyone knows how to read the data, please let us know. Maybe we can integrate something to RealDash.