openinverter forum

Hello, after buying my first new car in decades, a locked-down OEM EV, I caught the EV conversion bug. I've been doing the usual forum reading, github perusing, document downloading and youtube video watching and have started to convert another car I already own. I am an embedded systems designer (software + firmware + hardware) and a big supporter of open-source. I'm in awe of what you all have accomplished over the years and I hope that I will be able to contribute in some small way to the body of knowledge and designs you have created.
My big problem is that I live on the side of a hill without a garage or even level parking area so I am extremely challenged in the physical fabrication parts of conversions. Plus I'm not particularly experienced with wrenching or metal fabrication. But I'm an enthusiastic learner, have joined my local makerspace with a metal shop and am looking for cheap garage space. I have also been extremely fortunate to have met two wonderful people near me also doing conversions. I'm helping them out with electrical/software stuff and one of them has been able to help with the removal of the engine and we're going to get the gas tank out this coming weekend.
I was also lucky enough to get to part-out a 2017 Leaf S and ended up with the motor stack and complete set of electronics including the main wiring harnesses. One of my new friends got an Ioniq 5 battery pack and I bought half the modules from him for a ~38 kWh pack. I'm not sure yet which direction I will go for control of the car. I would like to see if I can make the EPS motor, brake booster and ABS module fit in the Solara but won't know that until I can get the dashboard removed. If I can fit those then I might try to re-use the Leaf VCM since it knows the dance between all those systems. I also want to re-use the HVAC controller with PTC and AC compressor fitted to the Solara's HVAC box. One thing I have learned so far is that reality often clashes with my ideas when I get into the details. So it could be that I will end up installing pumps for the existing brake system and hydraulic power steering. In that case I will use Zombieverter. I plan to design my own LCD based dashboard and re-use the Leaf's non-networked radio since it has bluetooth to connect with a phone.
Aside from the fun of the EV conversion itself I am really interested in the embedded systems aspect of conversions and would like to design electronics and write code in this space. As with all my personal projects of any general interest everything I do will be pushed to my github with open-source licensing.

I originally wrote about this project on the DIY Electric Car forum because I wasn't immediately using Openinverter or Zombieverter and didn't know if my project would fit here. But that forum seems to be in trouble so I hope you'll have me. I'll write about my progress and the stuff I design along the way. And if I can I'll help others and with the wiki.

Maybe some of the following things will be of interest to people here.

As I mentioned I want to re-use some Leaf components that haven't normally been used. This will take some CAN bus reverse-engineering (on top of the wonderful work that has already been done and documented). Originally I thought I would be re-using a 2019 Leaf that I bought. I thought I might have be able to identify where particular CAN Bus messages were coming from so I developed a PCB called CAN MIM MON (for CAN Man-in-the-middle monitor) based on a TI App Note for a CAN Bus repeater. I simply added another set of CAN Bus transceivers to be able to send the messages originating on each port. It can be found at https://github.com/danjulio/can_mim_mon.
Another use is to be able to extend monitoring CAN Busses far outside the vehicle without interfering with vehicle CAN Bus operation.

It works but I am still wanting to perform some real testing with error statistics gathering and the like.

Over time I realized it was kind of silly to take apart a perfectly good car, and a pretty complex one at that, and when I got access to a crashed 2017 Leaf to part out I gave up on that idea. But I still wanted CAN Bus data and borrowed another friend's 2015 Leaf and collected a bunch of CAN bus traces of the car doing various things, with the goal of figuring out some of the other systems (brakes, power steering, HVAC, etc). All of these CAN bus traces can be found at https://github.com/danjulio/can_logs. There are over 100 log files. The file names mostly describe what's in the log. Maybe they can be helpful to others figuring out Leaf components.

I use socketcan and socketcand running on a Raspberry Pi 5 compute module for all my CAN Bus experimentation and logging because it is so incredibly capable. I wrote a quick&dirty program to convert the output of socketcan's candump utility to the OVMS CRTD format for use by SavvyCAN. It can be found at https://github.com/danjulio/cd2crtd.

It will translate candump output such as
to
It supports multiple busses. can0 is bus 1, can1 is bus 2 and so-forth.

Have you seen https://github.com/dalathegreat/leaf_can_bus_messages ?

It's likely an add-on afterwards, but given your background do have a look at OpenCarwings: https://github.com/developerfromjokela/opencarwings.
The Continental telematics unit seems to be mostly decoded now and can still be used with a new SIM as-is in the Leaf.

jrbe wrote: ↑Wed Dec 17, 2025 8:36 pm Have you seen https://github.com/dalathegreat/leaf_can_bus_messages ?

Yup. I've got that downloaded and have been through it many times

marcexec wrote: ↑Thu Dec 18, 2025 9:03 am It's likely an add-on afterwards, but given your background do have a look at OpenCarwings: https://github.com/developerfromjokela/opencarwings.
The Continental telematics unit seems to be mostly decoded now and can still be used with a new SIM as-is in the Leaf.

Thanks for this. My Leaf was an S and didn't come with the TCU but I suspect they're cheap and I've seen people resurrecting them with new SIM cards on the mynissanleaf forums.