Dear members.

As the owner of a Honda Insight I have been investigating the three main control modules in the vehicle.

BCM Battery Control Module
MCM Motor Control Module
ECM Engine Control Module

Now i'm not after hacking the ecm, but i am after hacking the bcm/mcm modules.

These two are based on the Hitachi H8/538 cpu family and they both have 10 pin programming connectors on board.

Ideally i would like to download and dissasemble the programs from both these units.

Is that going to be possible?

What hardware/software will be needed?

I would also like to monitor and decode the serial data sent between the bcm/mcm units, i'm looking at a logic analyser/serial data for this. The details i have been able to glean so far about these units is below.

Some info I posted on the Insight website might be useful.

I really would like to find out what's being said when messages are passed between the various links/control units in our cars. The main reason I would like to know is to effectively fake the battery full signal/message to the MCM so that full assist/soc is available at all times.

Anyone care to guess at the protocol being used for the BATTSCI1 & BATTSCI2 signals?

Even if we just end up capturing a full battery signal/message and then keep sending it out with a pic without even understanding it that would do at a pinch.

Here are a couple of scans from the manuals, which clearly mention a serial SOC (State of Charge) signal is being sent on connector pins (7) & (20) BATTSCI1 & BATTSCI2, these seem to have a pull up and pull down resistor shown, and Logic ground is also available. So thoughts? capture data between the two wires or referenced to ground and as two separate channels, is one transmit, other recieve? I suspect so.

http://www.solarvan.co.uk/insight/BcmDiagram1.jpg

http://www.solarvan.co.uk/insight/BcmDiagram2.jpg

Just looked into a spare BCM module and to my surprise this one does not have the chip blacked out!!

It's a hitachi H8/538

Couple of data sheets here

http://www.solarvan.co.uk/insight/H8_538Datasheet1.pdf

http://www.solarvan.co.uk/insight/H8_538Datasheet2.pdf

Looks like page 389 onwards in datasheet 1 looks critical to my project. Describes the serial inteface

Also page 118 in datasheet 2 looks interesting, are all three modules, BCM, ECM, MCM using this system on same bus?

Here are some high res unresized pics of the innards of the three modules. I used macro mode with my cheapo compact camera but you can see quite a bit. All about 1mb

The Bcm & Mcm have the same cpu H8/538, the Ecm seems to have a different one.

http://www.solarvan.co.uk/insight/bcm.jpg

http://www.solarvan.co.uk/insight/mcm.jpg

http://www.solarvan.co.uk/insight/ecm.jpg

Interestingly the bcm & mcm I opened have a 10pin programming connector on the main board, now I had heard some could be updated with a special programmer/software. Anyone ever seen this?

Peter

 

I don't think the moderators of Honda-Tech even know that there is a model named Insight. There doesn't seem to be a forum for the Insight. Good Luck.