Back into an i3

I gave my e46 away about 3 years ago, and have been driving an i3 since then, a funky little BMW electric. About 4 months ago, my cheap lease was up, and it went back to BMW. I shared my wife’s car for about 3 months, until she couldn’t stand it and told me to get another car. I’ve pretty much committed to driving an EV, so my options were pretty limited given our budget. I tried a used Nissan Leaf, which I couldn’t get very excited about, thought heavily about the Chevy Bolt EV, which was hard to get a good deal in IL. Well, I’ve been driving BMWs exclusively for a little over a decade, so I’m back in an i3 – this time a fully loaded 2014 that I bought used for a great price.
I’ve been interested in autonomous vehicles over the last 3-4 years as the technology started catching up with the promises. In the fully loaded BMWs, there’s actually a lot of autonomous driver assistance systems for a 2014 car, and I followed the efforts of others trying to enable the Traffic Jam Assistant (TJA) functions. On the X5 forums, several F15 X5 drivers bought the capacitive steering wheel and associated electronics to retrofit their X5s, and were successful. I realized that the LIN bus communication was the missing piece to enable TJA.
So I’ve been sitting with an O-Scope and serial capture interfaces the last month or so to characterize the LIN communication that the car is looking for to indicate an increase in capacitance at the steering wheel, and now have an emulator here that sends those messages such that the TJA functions can be tested before a full retrofit is attempted.