Good morning guys,

I'm Jim, 20 years old and studying Applied Physics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. As my dad has been working on cars his whole life and runs his own shop, my interest in the automotive world has always been there. I love electronics and I like to play around with microcontrollers or analog circuits. When automotive electronics caught my interest, I started doing repairs on older instrument clusters, small ECU's and other easy-to-understand parts.

However, the newer stuff is all about more ECU's and more CAN etc. New cars being complete digital infrastructure systems fascinate me, and i'm currently building a CAN interface around an STN1110 and an ATmega162 to get some experience with the vehicle communication protocols.

As this stuff is purely for understanding and learning, I want to move on to some more serious measurement and/or modding. For this, I am planning to buy one of Kvaser's interfaces or one of the many alternatives and interface it with MATLAB/Simulink as I am pretty familiar with this software.

I hope I'm at the right place at this forum, as I hope to get some more information and advice or experiences on which interface works best and is the most versatile when combined with MATLAB, how am I going to get my hands on A2L/DBC files, etc. etc.

If you ever happen to have some interesting literaterature, software, information or advice, send me a PM and I will be very grateful!