HVAC CAN Translator System
When automakers shifted toward capacitive-touch controls for essential vehicle functions in the mid-2010s, I wanted to retrofit the physical-button HVAC control panel from a 2016+ Ford Explorer into my 2013 model. What initially seemed like a simple retrofit became a challenging engineering project, requiring the reverse engineering of two CAN bus architectures and the development of a custom bidirectional translation system to seamlessly bridge the two.