MoTeC Global Forum

The car has a central body control unit which sends out information about operation of indicators and other warning lights.How should this CAN data be imported into Display Creator please?
For example, I want to set up indicator lights on the dash with on/off signals coming via CAN.

First, you need to setup the communications template in dash manager.
This obviously involves setting the base address, the offset, length and bitmask for the messages that you are after.

Once you have done this, you need to add the newly created channels into the display list to transmit the message over onto display creator.
After this is complete, and you save the dash manager file, the application should also automatically save you a .DBC file along with the dash file, this file is used within display creator to generate a channel list, and then allow you to use the channels in the display you are setting up.

There are a few examples of this within display creator itself. If you create a new display creator file and scroll down within the template window, there is a template that has indicator icons, highbeam icons etc etc. If you have a look at how these work, you should be able to setup your own version of this using a switch for the flashing functionality.

You may like to have a look at the following links to get you started:
https://www.motec.com.au/webinars/webinararchive/#DC
https://www.motec.com.au/filedownload.php/display_creator_user_manual.pdf?docid=4628

Thanks!
I was thinking that we could import a .dbc file created by Cancapture or similar.
It seems that I was on the wrong track!

With the current versions of the Colour Display managers, you can import dbc files directly into the manager, The messages need to be correctly formatted with no spaces in the names, otherwise the import will fail. Once this file is imported into the Dash Manager, then you can add them into the Display Creator configuration through the process described by Ryan.

The dbc created by the Dash Manager is in CAN Extended format.