Brief background first; I have data from CAN bus of a steering angle which is obviously in hex. The steering angle covers two bytes of a message. The specification document I have says that those two bytes form a 16-bit signed int which are the steering angle which a prescaler of 1/1024, that's all I have got (I don't have access to the source). What I am trying to do is to convert those hex values into signed int, however I am not sure how to do it correctly.

A small section of the CAN message within short time period (we are focusing on byte 3 and 4):

can0  700   [8]  00 00 99 93 55 0B EF BD
can0  700   [8]  00 00 95 95 10 0C 17 BE
can0  700   [8]  00 00 6F 97 FB 0A 17 BE
can0  700   [8]  00 00 39 99 5C 0A 40 BE
can0  700   [8]  00 00 AD 9A 62 08 EF BD
can0  700   [8]  00 00 EF 9B B5 08 40 BE
can0  700   [8]  00 00 CA 9D 9A 09 17 BE
can0  700   [8]  00 00 3E 9F 55 09 40 BE
can0  700   [8]  00 00 91 A0 ED 09 17 BE

As far as I know, typically, data in CAN messages follow this format: one byte for the actual data, one byte for the number of overflows.

For example, let's take an unsigned int of a value of 2000. Assuming byte #0 is for overflows, byte #1 is for actual data, we get:

CAN message -> [07, D0, x, x, x, x, x, x]

07 indicating that there have been 7 overflows, D0 indicating the remainder is 208, therefore:

7*255 + 208 = 2000

I understand how to do it with unsigned values. But this time in my scenario I am dealing with signed values. I am assuming one byte is for overflows, one byte is for the remainder, however I am not sure.

1. How are overflows calculated for signed values? Is it overflow += 1 when value > 127 and overflow -= when value < -128? Does it even make sense for overflows to have signedness?

2. How can I convert these bytes into signed decimal in C/C++? Let's say my byte value in hex is 91. Last time I tried storing it in int and printed it out, it printed out 145 (normal binary) and not -111 (2's complement). How can I enforce 2's complement (if that makes sense) in my code?

3. Could I be interpreting the byte format wrong? All it says that these two bytes represent the steering angle and that the steering angle is int16_t. I have monitored them change in real time and one of them changes erratically, almost like jumping from 00 to FF, whereas the other one is increasing/decreasing slowly and almost linearly with time. Ideas?

I am really stuck here, I don't even know if I am going in the correct direction.. Any suggestions and help are really appreciated!