Blog - All Comments

RE: Hercules microcontrollers, DMA and Memory Cache

Naveen_R — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 06:27:33 GMT

Hi,
Thanks for this blog, where I found a clear-cut explanation on Cache coherence with DMA.

I could not be able to find the link for 4b which is a continuation of this blog, can you please share that link.

Kind Regards,
Naveen

RE: A Smart Car Key - What's Inside?

sukrame1975 — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 08:40:15 GMT

Is there a chance that someone can measure the two marked coils? Would be grateful for values. Thanks.

RE: A Smart Car Key - What's Inside?

apronxy — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 09:44:23 GMT

Hello Jan,

Thank you very much for sharing the information with us. I hope you can view this message after 2 years of this topic being posted.

My key fob is out of order and one of the capacitors is detached and visibly broken. Finally, it was lost during trying to re-soldering it back to see if the fob functioned again.
I'm going to buy a new capacitor for repair. But the newly bought multi-functional meter doesn't give me a solid figure about the capacitance value of the same size capacitor on the board. Furthermore, I have no idea what the voltage of the capacitor should be.

Do you have any idea what capacitor is inside the blue circle? Thank you.

RE: What Exactly is V2G?

BigG — Wed, 11 May 2022 16:07:21 GMT

There's a chap on YouTube (Julian Ilett) who's done some interesting hands-on vehicle-to-load tests using his electric car... I found these 2 videos quite helpful in understanding how it works.

www.youtube.com/watch

RE: What Exactly is V2G?

robogary — Wed, 11 May 2022 15:01:52 GMT

Interesting crowdsourcing concept. What does it do to EV battery lifetime ?

RE: Create and Measure signals with Hercules High End Timer (HET) - 2: Generate Dynamic Duty Cycle

Jan Cumps — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 19:06:52 GMT

better late than ...

I attached the CCS projects for a TMS570LC43 LaunchPad

RE: A Smart Car Key - What's Inside?

genebren — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 19:44:25 GMT

Very interesting. I hope that you are able to identify more of the parts and hopefully post more updates.

RE: A Smart Car Key - What's Inside?

Jan Cumps — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 18:45:25 GMT

I knew I had seen the unmarked SMDs before, but wrongly remembered it as a fuse.

[View:/resized-image/__size/331x306/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-421f0d88-f665-48fb-b0d4-f68419cdadfc/contentimage_5F00_193520.png:331:306]

It's a TVS: https://www.element14.com/community/community/applications/automotive/blog/2020/09/04/the-blinker-in-a-side-view-mirror-…

RE: CAN communication with Hercules Safety Microcontroller - part 4: Bus Load Firmware

Jan Cumps — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 16:40:23 GMT

Meanwhile: 76 million transactions

[View:/resized-image/__size/620x135/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-b7398efb-a110-4ac8-9681-811cb2ef14d1/5826.contentimage_5F00_193493.png:620:135]

RE: CAN communication with Hercules Safety Microcontroller - part 4: Bus Load Firmware

Jan Cumps — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 13:42:42 GMT

I've attached the code and project.

I used Code Composer Studio 10.1, TI Arm compiler 20.2.4 (long time stable release) and HALCoGen 4.07.01.

It's for the Hercules TMS570LS04 LaunchPad (the cheapest, simplest).

Can be easily adapted for the advanced Hercules controllers. It makes sense to start using DMA then.

RE: CAN communication with Hercules Safety Microcontroller - part 4: Bus Load Firmware

genebren — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:02:00 GMT

Nice setup. Someday, I might need to do some CAN bus work/testing, so I might need to re-visit this. Great idea to build tools to let you test performance under heavily loaded conditions

RE: CAN communication with Hercules Safety Microcontroller - part 4: Bus Load Firmware

DAB — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 20:46:46 GMT

Good update Jan.

DAB

RE: A Smart Car Key - What's Inside?

14rhb — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 12:02:02 GMT

You mention the SPI flash memory. This is another source of functional insight that could be exploited: capture the SPI activity in several scenarios (power up, buttons pressed etc) and pass it through some tools. Inspect the data using Wireshark to see if a known protocol is flagged up, look for some unique codes that you may already have...maybe the car's VIN plate ID?. Is the data the same on each power up and no activity when the keys are pressed - indicating it only stores the same FPGA bitstream or MCU code. Does some data change on each keypress - maybe the bytes around stay fixed, indicating this is something to do with the encryption key/rolling code? Indeed often you'd find some readable ASCII in the dataset to better realise what that SPI flash is doing.

You could also try a disassembler if you thought it was MCU program code; would be hard work though !

RE: A Smart Car Key - What's Inside?

phoenixcomm — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 23:16:59 GMT

[mention:acaf6a9338de4eef8f6717d5561ed01d:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] verry cool, thanks.

RE: A Smart Car Key - What's Inside?

kmikemoo — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 22:51:02 GMT

[mention:acaf6a9338de4eef8f6717d5561ed01d:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] Very cool! Of chips 1 & 2, would one be a transceiver and the other be a security chip of some sort?