Ford As Built Data Deciphering

[ClockWorK]

Unfortunately the ETIS site requires a registered account. If you have one, you may need to open the site with IE and save your login info. My tool uses an IE browser to get the HTML.

I'm not familiar with microcat.

[Automate]

@ClockWork is there a reason your app uses ETIS instead of https://www.motorcraftservice.com/AsBuilt ?

[Lukeyson]

ETIS registered account. Can anyone get an account? Or is it workshops only? I recall toying with the idea of registering awhile back, but the pages grew increasingly threatening that it was for workshops only. Do I dare look for something on bugmenot....

For 'Automate', the Compare tool collects data from both ETIS and Motorcraft. ETIS is used to find out what features the VINS you have supplied have, and Motorcraft to find the As-Built data for each, and then the software goes through and finds which bits in the As-Built are consistently on or off for all cars with and without your features. The more VIN samples you have with different options, or options specific to what you are after, the better the chance you can narrow down the specific bits. My issue is that for my car ETIS is not providing the features - which appears to be due to not having a registered account.

Microcat is the Ford Catalog that is shipped to dealers and is used by the Spare Parts department to lookup the parts and pricing that are relevant to your car. I can search by VIN and get my As-Built parts, or I can search by a Major Attribute and find all of the parts that are relevant.


Luke

[gg1234635]

Hi all

Can some explain these different systems to me. I know of etis and i have created an account for it and ive got my as built data from Motorcraft. but whats microcat and automate and others that mentioned on here. How do i get them and how much does it cost?

[Lukeyson]

Increasingly threatening indeed..... "Unauthorised access may be subject to legal action". Shizen.

So, is that the end of the story? Is the comparator only good for people who work for a Ford Dealer and have access to ETIS? Or can I just punch on through the lawyer-wall?


Luke

[Lukeyson]

Alright, I took the plunge and registered at ETIS. I did a lot of squinting and shielding myself from possible flac just in case.

It all went through fine, I can now logon to Etis. And yes, the Comparator app is now pulling the features list from the ETIS html pages.

Time to start pulling down as many VINS as I can get, and see if I can understand how this 'perfect Bits' deducer thingo works.....wish me luck, but I'm getting a wee bit excited.



Luke

[Lukeyson]

@Clockwork - are you still making changes/revisions to your app, or is it 'done and dusted'?

I say this, because if we find a way to scrape out loads and loads of VIN's of a particular model, do you think it feasible to modify your app to load up a list of VINS from a txt file generated by the results of a big GREP and pull the ETIS/As Built data for all those VINS all in one go? Or are all the user interactions and file save OK's a necessary evil?

Your tool is brilliant and is helping me immensely, but the ability to load a huge number of vins in one go would help even more immensely. And if my attempts to script up a grep extract of VINs is successful tonight, well, I may have more VINs than I know what to do with.

I've already managed to manually pull out 50 or so VIN's of the B256/B257 5th gen Fiesta (MK5/6 in Europe, MK6/6.5 in UK), and that has helped me narrow down a couple of bits-to-features in body module 726, but I will be focusing on getting vins of the 2006-2008 models to see if I can narrow them down even more. With loads of Vins it makes the analysis so much easier. Thankfully, cars of that vintage don't have too many options in the As-Built. So far I've narrowed down the 'Remote Central Locking' bits, and may have found the 'auto wipers' bits.

If not, no probs, we'll continue as-is. I have a backup mouse for all the clicks....


One more thing, are there pages further back in this thread that describe what the 'Feature by Vehicles' tab in your app is? I can't get my head around how I use it. I am mainly living in the 'Feature by Bit' page.


Luke

[Lukeyson]

Hmm

Now that I have done a full export of what I have, it looks like this database is either not a comprehensive source, or there is some way to generate intermediate VINs based on those in the discovered list.

Attached is my extract of all 2006 to 2008 VINS I could find for B256/B257 Fiestas/Fusions made in Cologne, Germany or Valencia, Spain.

My query was: grep -Poah "(WF0[CUHD]XX[GW][AP]J[CUHD][678]\w{6})" MCVIN.dat > ALL06to08.CSV

WF0 is the WMI
CUHD are the body types (3d Van, 5d Fusion, 5d Saloon, 3d Saloon) - this is in there twice.
[GW][AP] are the Cologne/Valencia letters of GA and WP - and yes, this would have allow GP or WA, not that I cared.
678 are the years
\w{6} are 6 characters of any type
XX and J are fixed characters.

ALL06to08.CSV

(23.64 KiB) Downloaded 770 times

This has got to be about the best way to go about collecting VINs I reckon.

If anyone wants a search done for EU, I can do a couple if you give me a search string like the one I assembled above. Although it does look like I might have access to a US data source too.....


Luke

[ClockWorK]

I don't really keep the app updated much, but I try to keep it working with the latest changes to the ETIS site. I totaled my Taurus back in October 2018 so I haven't had a Ford for 6 months now. I hope to get another SHO or Interceptor eventually so I am trying to keep up with the community when I can.

It sounds like you got the downloading sorted out with the ETIS site. If there were a way to automate it, I would. This is as good as I could make it for now.

The intent of 'Feature by Vehicle' it is to identify bits that are constant across all selected vehicles with the selected feature. The identified bits are possible matches for the selected feature. The 'Feature by bit' tab is more a reverse version, searching all selected vehicles with that bit turned on, identifying constant features.

I haven't used this too myself in a long time so it's hard for me to speak concisely to it's functionality. I mainly used the 'Feature by Vehicle' tab when I was using it.

[Lukeyson]

Thanks Mate. Understood.

And yes, I took the ETIS plunge.

Some more quick questions:

(1) Still on 'Feature by Vehicle'. Is it as simple as 'A count of the total number of VINS where that bit=1 AND the VIN feature' and then if that count matches the total number of enabled VINS, it becomes a Perfect Bit?

(2) Your program seems to parse all the HTML/ab files and create an internal table or db so it can do the statistical analysis. Is there a way to copy or export that table/db? For example, exporting a table of the ETIS data for VINS versus features, and which features are enabled. OR exporting a table of the Motorcraft data for VIN versus As-Built Modules/Addresses with the HEX values. Does it put that data into a temp file somewhere while it is working and I can intercept that, or does it just keep it in memory?

(3) Your 'Features List' doesn't seem to include anything from the 'Major Features' items - such as the Air Conditioning type, as I'm hunting for As-Built data on auto-AC enabled models.

I have the opposite problem now. I have too many VINs, and the deducer is unable to come up with any consistencies at all. The 'features' list for that model seems to have evolved over the life of the model, or some features that are the same change text. There look to be a number of differences between the same model/body/year built at different plants - I have over 108 vins now manually grabbed using the CSV above. I need to cull. But how to know what to remove?

With my new "too-many-VINS" issue, If I had some way to view the parsed data in a table, I could determine what files I need to remove from the deducer folder, or find and compare VINS that have near identical features in something like Excel and focus on them.

If there's no export capability, if only your Browser Tab had the ability to view all that data in one big Features or As-Built table.....

FYI, I followed the Paypal link in your app and pitched in a little bit.


Luke