Salt harvesters are built to withstand the especially corrosive environment in which they operate. Like many highly-specialised machines, they are hard to replace and are expensive when you do.

With the main operating interface ageing due to salt crystal build-up inside the screen, this Australian salt mining company’s Caterpillar-based models were becoming inoperable. CANautomotion, a Kvaser sales representative based in Australia, was asked to install new operator interfaces, but without access to the original ECM program and J1939 library.

CANautomotion’s engineers used a Kvaser USB-CAN interface along with Warwick Control’s X-analyser 3 Pro software, a Kvaser Memorator Pro 2xHS v2 data logger and a CAN Crocodile contactless CAN reader to upgrade the operating interface. This article describes how they did it.