Articles

Browse through my technical articles, guides, and tutorials covering ECU programming, home automation, electronics, and various other projects.

Going Paperless: Self-Hosted Document Management with Paperless-NGX

Every year the same ritual: hunting through years of email to find last year's home insurance policy, the car MOT certificate, or proof of an Amazon return. It works — barely — but it is not a system. It is a memory test.

Paperl...

Adding an Indicator Stalk to Tesla Model 3 Highland - A retrofit guide


Quick Specs:

  • Cost: £142 delivered (AliExpress)
  • Install Time: ~45 minutes
  • Difficulty: Medium (requires basic tools and patience)
  • Tools Needed: All included in kit
  • Reversible: Yes
  • Warranty Impact: Potentiall...

If you want to access the Admin menu, the password on the sticker is incorrect.

Introduction

The Technicolor DGA4134NLK Broadband Router is a cheap router supplied by a couple of broadband providers here in the UK. If you would want to utilise it's WiFi capabilities but you need to switch-off it...

Getting Generation 1 Devices to Work in 2023

Introduction

I have a few LightwaveRF Gen1 dimmer switches which I used to control using Domoticz and an RFXCOM 433MHz dongle. After changing over to use Home Assistant I thought that my days of controlling them was over since the official Home As...

A faulty device buzzes and the Manual Status Button Just Flashes - How to Fix

Introduction

These AN157-3 Z-Wave socket outlets are very good but they only switch ON/OFF and don't have any on-board power metering. They are able to switch power at full load, have a programmable status light and ar...

Updating Docker and its zwavejs2mqtt container on a RPI3 running Buster no longer works

Note that this was done many years ago on a very early version of the Pi.

Introduction

I use Home Assistant with a remote Raspberry Pi 3 fitted with an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 Z-Wave dongle running the excell...

Disassembling a Bosch ME7.1 ECU with IDA Pro

I did these tutorials many years ago, October 2007 to be exact.

Here I will teach you how to disassemble a Bosch ME7.5.5 ECU using IDA Pro. When you are presented with a new type of ECU binary image, you have to disassemble the image multiple times be...

Setting up a 2022 Raspberry Pi 3B or Pi 4 for 1-wire Temperature Measurement

This is a very old and out-of-date article

Introduction

I use several 1-wire temperature probes (DS18B20) to measure a few things in my home set-up, mainly my central heating and solar hot water panels. I have them co...

What? New Battery Not Recognised?

Introduction

My home set-up consists of two parallel LUX LXP3600 inverters with two banks (strings) of six PylonTech US3000 Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo) 3.5kWh battery banks. This was giving me a usable 18kWh of battery storage to run my house from. The batte...

ecufix1

ECUFix is now at version 6.4.1.1 Updated 27th March 2022

EcuFix Logo

General

If you wanted to modify your Bosch Motronic M3.8/M5x/ME7.1/7.5 but couldn't get the checksums fixed or, more importantly, needed to pay someone to fix them for you, here's the solution….

ECUFIX

How Easy Is It To Use?

We...

Last modified: 25 July 2004

Introduction

I've used to be a DJ and worked with a Pioneer DJM-500 mixer for a number of years. However, I was irritated by the fact it didn't have a mic-switch nor an automatic talk-over fader.

Here's the DJM-500 in its coffin (click to enlarge):

DJM-500 in coffin

And here's th...

A Police Lotus Esprit

One of my friends sent me this photograph.

A Police Lotus Esprit

I believe this picture is courtesy of Chris Ward. It was found at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/steve.warren/frames.htm — whether it's still there, I don't know.

I wonder if it's true? Probably not….

Has the guy on the bike put t...

This was done for a client circa 1998. My customer had a long pipe where at one end four transducers were pulsed with a user-definable waveform and, at the other end, there were another four transducers that listened to the resulting sound pulse.

The project required a custom 4-channel digital to...

RS232 cable wiring diagrams and pinout configurations for connecting computers and communication equipment.

Introduction

I hope you like this. If you have ever wanted to connect to PCs or any two pieces of communications equipment together, it's easy to get confused about what connection goes wh...

Subaru Imprezza Ice-Skating

This page is absolutely years old. I thought it was funny at the time but can you imagine what the guy who drove this felt like? I bet he ended up feeling cold!

Subaru Imprezza Ice Skating 1

Subaru Imprezza Ice Skating 3

Subaru Imprezza Ice Skating 4

Subaru Imprezza Ice Skating 6

Subaru Imprezza Ice Skating 5

For your information, changes were last made on: 11th February 2018

FreeScan Dashboard

To help me with the Lotus Esprit protocol, I spent some 10 minutes with a Vetronix Tech1 scanner connected to my Lotus Esprit at the beginning of August 1999. This showed me how to initiate a conversation with the ECU.

FreeSca...

Back in 1998, a friend of mine asked me to design a Windows GUI for the drinks dispensing machine in our favourite burger joint. This is what I came up with.

About

Mac98 About screen

Initial Setup

Mac98 Initial Setup screen

Dispense Head Portion Setup

Mac98 Dispense Head Portion Setup screen

Dispensed Information

Mac98 Dispensed Information screen

Portion Size Editor

Mac98 Portion Size Editor screen