Case study
Ford Fiesta MK5 MS-CAN: decoding the dashboard and radio bus
Documents the medium-speed CAN bus that links the 6000CD radio and the dashboard of a restyled (post-2006) Ford Fiesta MK5, worked out by tapping the bus at the radio's QuadLock connector with a Seeed CAN-BUS Shield on an Arduino Uno. The README describes 18 partly or fully decoded message IDs on the 125 kbit/s bus, with byte layouts and scaling formulas: radio text sent to the dashboard LCD over ISO-TP, station names, volume, CD track and steering-column mode and seek buttons, as well as broadcast clock, door, lock, reverse-gear, indicator, light, handbrake, airbag-lamp, pedal, RPM, speed, coolant, key-position, battery and partial VIN data. An incomplete Kayak .kcd definition encodes only the clock and gas-pedal/RPM/speed messages.
- Targets
- Protocol
- Category
- Independent reconstruction cases
- Relationship
- Independent reconstruction project
- Sources reviewed
Requirements & limits
- Documentation-only project with 25 commits from 2020-08-22 to the reviewed master commit of 2020-09-30, and no releases or tags. It applies to a Fiesta MK5 built after 2006 (the restyled model) with the 2-DIN 6000CD radio; the README notes that the steering-column volume buttons do not appear on MS-CAN, and the decoding of some IDs is partial.
- No Ford software or files are needed; reading the bus requires a CAN interface on the CANH and CANL lines at the radio's QuadLock connector, which the README says needs no 120-ohm terminator. The author used a Seeed CAN-BUS Shield V2.0 on an Arduino Uno R3, but the repository holds only the README, the Kayak .kcd file, a connector pinout image and dashboard indicator icons, with no capture logs, sniffer code or Arduino sketch.
- Message layouts and formulas such as volume, track time, speed, coolant temperature and battery voltage are author-reported from the author's own car, and the ISO-TP reading of the LCD text messages is credited to a Reddit commenter. The README documents decoding of observed traffic and gives no procedure for sending frames to the car.
- The repository has no license file and GitHub detects none.
About this entry
The description was reviewed against primary sources.
Primary sources
- README.md GitHub · roncapat/Ford-Fiesta-MK5-MS-CAN-bus · Revision 7b57901
- README.md#L14-L136 GitHub · roncapat/Ford-Fiesta-MK5-MS-CAN-bus · Revision 7b57901
- Fiesta.kcd GitHub · roncapat/Ford-Fiesta-MK5-MS-CAN-bus · Revision 7b57901
- https://github.com/roncapat/Ford-Fiesta-MK5-MS-CAN-bus/tree/7b57901e7ea6a293aacb692c1895110b2ec7175c
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