Bring your own car

The bundled Ioniq profile is just an example. canair's tooling is vehicle-agnostic — this journey takes you from nothing to decoded, verified diagnostic signals for your car, stored in a profile you can share.

You don't need to know your car's PIDs in advance. The discovery and scan commands are a write path: they populate the profile as they find things, so the profile grows itself as you work.

The arc

flowchart LR
    A["1. create profile"] --> B["2. discover ECUs"]
    B --> C["3. read identity"]
    C --> D["4. scan for data"]
    D --> E["5. capture<br/>(while driving/charging)"]
    E --> F["6. analyze"]
    F --> G["7. define & verify"]
    G --> H["8. share"]
    F -.->|more data needed| E

Step	You do	Result
1. Create a profile	canair profile create	An empty, valid profile bundle
2. Discover ECUs	canair discover --register	Every responding ECU written into ecus/
3. Read identity	canair identity / discover --identify	Part numbers, versions, VIN
4. Scan for data	canair scan	Which PIDs/DIDs each ECU answers
5. Capture	canair read … --save	Real payloads with driving/charging context
6. Analyze	decode / correlate / hunt / investigate	Which byte is which signal
7. Define & verify	canair pids upsert-param, coverage	Named parameters in ecus/
8. Share	canair wican autopid write	WiCAN AutoPID JSON; a profile to contribute

Optional side-journey: 9. Broadcast CAN frames decodes signals that are broadcast on the internal bus (drive mode, regen, wheel speeds) rather than answered on request — a parallel import → analyze → define arc for when you have a raw frame log. See also Broadcast CAN frames.

It's a loop, not a line

Reverse-engineering is iterative. You'll often capture some data, analyze it, realize you need different conditions (accelerating vs. coasting, plugged vs. charging), and go capture again. That's expected — the dashed arrow above.

The rule of thumb: read and capture freely, define conservatively. Mark new parameters --unverified until you've confirmed them against a known reference or across enough captures, then promote them. See Define & verify.

Before you start

Make sure you've done Getting started — canair installed, your dongle configured, and canair status reporting a reachable device. Everything below assumes that works.

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Next: 1. Create a profile →