Select your DashCAN product and your ECU below to see the matching step by step setup guide.
Not listed? Any ECU that broadcasts on CAN can be mapped by hand, see the note at the bottom of this page.
To set up the device, connect the following four wires from the DashCAN Apex harness:
Connect the CAN High and CAN Low wires to the CAN bus of your ECU, the exact pins are in the ECU section below.
Important! To ensure signal integrity, the CANH and CANL wires must be routed as a twisted pair, and the total wire length should not exceed 1.5 meters.
For further help on wiring, please visit the Technical Help page.
Connect to the CAN bus of the ECU, for example a free port on the Haltech CAN hub or the CAN pair in the harness. Check your ECU's CAN connector in the Haltech documentation before you cut anything.
The Haltech broadcast runs at 1 Mbit/s.
The CAN bit rate is only adjustable on the DashCAN Apex, so this ECU needs an Apex interface.
Haltech buses are usually already terminated at both ends, so leave the 120 Ohm termination switch in the app turned off.
The DashCAN Apex unit contains a built-in GPS module and an IMU (inertial measurement unit). Where you mount the device directly affects the quality of the GPS and motion data, so take a moment to find a good spot.
Preferred orientation: mount the device flat and level. Any fixed mounting angle is acceptable, as the app can compensate, but keeping it level gives the best out-of-the-box result.
Elite and Nexus ECUs broadcast the Haltech V2 protocol on their CAN bus by default, so in most cars there is nothing to enable.
If your ECU has more than one CAN channel, open NSP (or ESP on older firmware) and check that the channel DashCAN is wired to is set to the Haltech CAN protocol. A channel assigned to a different protocol, for example an OEM or dash specific stream, carries no Haltech broadcast.
Nothing else has to be configured, and nothing in your tune changes.
These are the channels DashCAN can decode from this ECU. Channels your engine does not measure or your ECU does not transmit simply stay empty.
After installing the app, launch it and then approve all the permission requests and turn on Bluetooth, otherwise the app will not work properly!
Open the app, go to Settings and then the CAN bus page.
The baud rate has to match the bit rate your ECU broadcasts at. On the DashCAN OBD and Wire-in interfaces it is fixed at 500 kbit/s and the selector stays greyed out, on the DashCAN Apex you can pick it.
120 Ohm termination: leave it off when you tap into a bus that already works (a factory bus, a Haltech CAN hub, a Syvecs plug and play kit). Turn it on only when DashCAN and the ECU are the only two devices on the bus and nothing else terminates it. The switch needs hardware version 1.07 or newer.
If everything is done correctly the app connects to the DashCAN interface automatically. Start the engine and watch the RPM gauge: as soon as it follows the engine, the CAN side is working and you are ready to log.
If every gauge stays at zero, work through this list:
Still nothing? Contact us with your car, your ECU and its firmware version, and which DashCAN product you have.
DashCAN reads plain CAN broadcasts, so any ECU that can transmit one can be made to work. Pick the closest ECU in the list, then open the settings of each gauge in the app and set the CAN ID, start bit, length and byte order to match your ECU's broadcast, exactly as its documentation describes it.
Contact us and we will help you map it, and if the ECU is common enough we will add it to the app.