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Hack Your Ignition (Before Someone Else Does)
guanxi writes: "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article about hacking and specifically, the "hacker's nirvana on wheels", all the way from hot-rodding to reprogramming your digital ignition. Of course, I neither endorse nor recommend any of the procedures mentioned, any of which may be inherently dangerous to your life and your warranty. "
That's why I cycle. Nothing to hack into.
0xB
How about hacking digital odometers?
I'd imaging it is just stored in memory somewhere. Set'er back to 0 and no one would be the wiser!
here is a sweet page about modding cars. It can turn you into a ricer real quick. Car mods are pretty popular these days in my town, from big fins to stickers, to large exhaust pipes, there's just no end to the mods.
One of the problems with tuners is that they add more power without accounting for aging of components. This isn't usually a problem in racing since you're rebuilding your components after every or a number of races. But for "hackers," they often tune it and forget it--or tune it and increase the mods. Sometime down the road, they'll blow a piston or apex seal without warning. Not to mention several thousand dollars' down the drain.
I personally prefer more conservative tuning, but then when some guy beats you during an ad-hoc "race," your first instinct is "gotta get mo' power."
So how do you think you explain this to your car company if you screw it up?
Honda: "what's the problem, sir"
You: "well, I was wiring an internal network into my car and fused my hand to the cable and the glove box. Is this covered?"
Man invents automobile.
Man builds automobile.
Man adds digital data bus to automobile.
Man discovers that you can snoop on automobile's digital data busses.
Man succeeds.
Man discovers no useful information from snooping automobile's digital data bus.
Logical conclusion: Man has too much time on his hands.
Reverse-engineering is fun. Reverse-engineering embedded systems is even more fun, because it's hard. Reverse-engineering safety-critical embedded systems is really challenging, and not for the stupid.
Now, what the author is talking about is reverse-engineering the systems that control AntiLock braking, ignition, and transmission control, among other things. It's a really cheap way to improve performance on a car.
Car companies (well, at least Ford) have a bad history when it comes to electronic civil liberties. At what point in reverse-engineering a throttle control system would you be "bypassing an access protection device"? Probably never. But consider that Adobe got someone jailed for breaking ROT13; Cuecat was XOR. If people start selling hot-rod software (and they are), how long will it be till auto manufacturers start answering Yes to the author's "is it encrypted" question. It might only be ROT13, but it would be enough to bust anyone who was selling firmware upgrades for a Mustang and put them out of business for good.
Anyone remember the 60 minutes Audi 5000 scandal? Where the car's fuel injection system was said to, in rare cases, cause the car to accelerate out of control, causing injury or death? Let your subconcious do the dreaming about the accidents that could come from improperly debugged ABS code or throttle control. Now imagine that someone hacks their car's firmware, crashes in a fireball, and their family sues the automaker. The automaker can't prove that the car was modified... at all.
My prediction: this stuff will scare automakers shitless, and they will fall all overthemselves to find a way to apply the DMCA to stopping the dissemination of reverse-engineering information.
Of course, I could be wrong.
I've got a nice hack for ya.
New Ford F-150's, Expeditions, ect.
Unplug the main harness going to the digital display, and locate a gray wire, with a black stripe. (your VSS wire) Place a small strip of tape over the metal pin, and
VOLIA
no mo miles
I have used this software on my LT1 Camaro with excellent results. This software allows you to pretty much hack every aspect that the PCM controls easily.
LT1 Edit
Macs as a fetish property
There's replacement EEPROMS for various cars with digital ignition (as opposed to a distributor) available on the market, some of them may even be installed by your dealership (depends on the dealership of course). They've also been on the market for quite a while and aren't a novelty. If I'm correct, on non-digital-ignition automobiles, you can use MSD's system to retard or advance your ignition timing. Also, this is not a very safe way to increase your engine's power, as advancing ignition, raises the cylinder pressure far more than any other modification, in propotion to the gain (usually no more than 15 hp).
"dangerous to your life and your warranty"
Yeah I would hate to expireWhen you can check email from your car (you know Microsoft will get a piece of this), can you also send email to the slow f*ck in front of you with a virus to disable their brakes, or make them steer to the side of the road and then crash (non-lethal) their car?
my brother has an odb2 module and likes to play with the various settings etc in his engine directly from his laptop. the hardware is relatively cheap and is usually purchased along with software. its all windoze based of course. he spent around $1500 i believe for everything.
this *is not* for people who don't know what they're doing! you can adjust things like when your engine shifts, and really screw up your engine if you do something bad/wrong...
--w
E V E R Y T H I N G I W R I T E I S F A L S E
Do a search on that term...
If you have an American car, that is. ALDL is Assembly Line Data Link and it gives you a lot of information on your car.
I'm still wondering if I should tool around with it, I'm not eager to be a human guinea pig, unless it's for sexual experiments with a muscular fitness chick.
Here's a car that's been pre-hacked and souped up for ultimate geek driving: the MegaCar! I mean, just look at this picture. LCDs everywhere, 150k/sec mobile connectivity...The flash site is annoying, but damn, that car is sweet....
I think that this is probably an overblown hype piece, like so many others. What the article is talking about is simply a way to download information on the car's systems (much like what is already done in ,a href="http://www.formula1.com/news/home.html">F ormula One racing. This would not allow a hacker to gain control of your car in any way. Of course the threat of crashing the system is always there... The easiest solution to all these problems is to have manual backup systems. I don't like trusting my life to a computer, anyway.
In most cases, the manufacturer of most sports cars (corvette, etc.) has a liscensed third party like shelby for Ford. These suppliers and aftermarket manufacturers have certin chips that can be installed without ruining you entire warrenty. Sometimes, the warrenty is just modified to take out the changed part of the car.
Not only have they thought of everything that he was talking about, but they actually are doing it. This season, today, right now! Everything is adjustable, although some of it is not legal ;-) The best part, it is all adjustable, on the fly, literally. That's right boys and girls, wireless! Ferrari and Williams BMW are at the forefront, of course. There has been much effort into making sure that each of the teams are not vulnerable to hacking or jamming by the other teams. (The budget for these top-flight teams is supposedly nearly $200,000,000US)
Yep, you got it. I'll buy a beer for the first true hack on a Segway.
Suppose you had one, what would a cool hacker (such as you, dear reader) make it do?
Oh, BTW, I guess I'd have to buy you a Ginger Beer.
Alan.
This is really very common in the automotive tuning world already. Many companies have piggyback-style computers that intercept the signals entering and leaving the stock engine computer and modify them accordingly. Products like the A'PEXi S-AFC (among many many others) use relatively simple mathematical formulae (think...mx+b) or look-up tables to modify the signals that the engine computer sees from the sensors or the signals that the actuators see from the computer.
For the more advanced racer, there are entire standalong engine management systems that entirely the engine computer itself (think Haltech E6k and others).
The point here is that the signals used between sensors and microprocessors onboard a vehicle aren't difficult to decode. Most relate to measuring the resistance across a sensor or sending out a pulse to run a fuel injector at a given interval. Granted, the signals sent between the various computers are a bit more complex, but it's by no means impossible to decode. The only reason that 3rd-party aftermarket manufacturers are really the only people building these things is that there isn't a whole lot of return for the average home-mechanic. By the time Joe Six-Pack builds his engine management system, he's spent so much time that he could have enhanced the performance of his vehicle with all sorts of non-electronic devices that are cheaper and better understood in the automotive community.
Are there very cool things that can be done by the individual with a personally-designed engine (and transmission, and A/C, etc) management system? Sure! Loads of cool stuff!
Now how many people out there can spare the time, effort, and money to have a system that really only performs marginally better than anything that can be bought off the shelf? Not many people, that's for sure.
But luckily, that's what universities are for...which explains why I'm still in school.
Of course, I neither endorse nor recommend any of the procedures mentioned, any of which may be inherently dangerous to your life and your warranty.
Why did you send this story here then?
Audi of America will void the warranty on your turbo car if they catch or suspect you've been screwing with the computer. It's real easy to get a $400 chip and kick your 300hp S4 up to 400+ just by turning up the boost.
LV
Woot w00t w007.
(In the context of recent Japanese motorcycles:)
It is inappropriate to link to the Jargon File's main corpus....It is several megabytes, and costs the site maintainer mucho bandwidth so you can browse one entry.
. html
Use this: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hack
My impression was that the article writer doesn't have much experience in the tuning market, or he'd have mentioned chipping turbocharged engines, and he'd also demonstrate a better understanding of what goes on. Most chips(even for normally aspirated engines) don't just alter timing; they alter the fuel ratio to be perfect for power, which is different from the ideal air/fuel ratio for emissions. Yes, ignition timing does affect power/emissions too, but it's silly to ignore the other half of the equation. Also, among the european/asian car makes, programmable systems are pretty rare; most simply buy a preprogrammed chip from a company that's done the testing/setup for you. Makes a lot of sense considering how expensive some of these engines can be. Even just altering fuel mixture can cause substantial damage; too rich(ie too much fuel) and you'll cause the catalytic converters to overheat and melt($$$$$$.) Too lean, and you can raise the exhaust gas temperature to the point that you actually destroy the exhaust valves and they start leaking.
As for turbo chips...bear with me here. My car('91 Audi 200 quattro 20v turbo) makes 217hp stock. With new ROM chips for fuel/timing maps and a new pressure sensor supplied by an Audi tuner who has been in business since the early 80's...it makes almost 280, by allowing higher pressure from the turbo(aka "boost".) It yields sub 6 second 0-60 times for a full size luxury sedan(not to brag, but few cars, new or old, can beat me off the line, including any of Audi's current model lineup, unmodified.)
This particular chip pretty much stresses the limit of the k26 turbo; as with any turbo, spin it too fast and it'll disintegrate. These things operate at -very- high speeds...50,000 rpms is not uncommon...very high temps(several hundred degrees or more)...and very close tolerances. If a piece flies off or something, it can cause an enormous amount of damage; little pieces of the turbo can end up getting inhaled by the engine. If you're lucky, it doesn't take the engine with it. If you're not so lucky, the metal shards scratch the cylinder walls, or the oil causes so much crap to build up inside the cylinder that the compression ratio skyrockets and the engine starts to "knock"(ie when the mixture ignites before it should.) When the piston's still going up and the mixture ignites, you can break things. FAST. Look on almost all engines these days and you'll see a small sensor bolted to the block...it's a microphone, basically, and it listens for knocking(the ECU knows when it fired a spark plug, so if it gets a noise when it hasn't...tada, knocking.)
Particularly with a chip, there are a lot of things that can push the turbo over the edge...for example, a clogged air filter will make the turbo work harder to pressurize the same amount of air(ie, it'll need to spin faster.) While the engine control unit(ECU) takes into account high elevation via an external barometric sensor, it can't tell if your air filter is clogged! Another danger is that the intake air temperature can be too high; as you compress air, it heats up, and if it's too hot, the further compression in the cylinder will heat it beyond the flash point of the gas/air mixture, and you get knocking(see above.) You can also exceed the limits of the mechanical strength of the connecting rods(ie what connects the piston to the crankshaft, transferring the force of the explosion into mechanical rotation), the head bolts(what holds the "head" of the engine up against the block; it forms the top of the cylinder, and the more powerful the explosion in the cylinder, the more stress on the head bolts), the transmission, even the driveshafts sometimes
Some early chip designs for A4/S4 models pushed the turbos just a tad too much(the vendor in question had a bad reputation in the first place) and turbos were getting overspun left+right(expensive, considering the S4 has -two- turbos.)
Audi of America got wise to it, and unfortunately, is now -extremely- aggressive about going after owners who have installed aftermarket chips, despite the fact that they're quite safe now that more reputable tuners(who do better QA testing) have forced the crappy chips off the market.
So, dealers started checking ECUs for signs of removal, modification, etc. Owners countered by buying spare ECUs and installing the unmodified ECUs back into the car before having it serviced.
Amusingly, AoA caught on to this too...because their Client Relations staff were reading the webboards these guys belonged to. They were dumb enough to brag about it after "fooling the dealer".
VW and Audi have already started introducing encryption+verification that keys the ECU to all sorts of other things in the car so that it can't be easily swapped. VW/Audi's "real" reason is that it is for antitheft reasons.
It took all but a month or two for someone to figure out how to get around the keying. Same debate as publishing security exploits...except that cars generally don't get stolen unless they can be stolen in a few minutes, and keying the ECU doesn't prevent theft(it just makes the ECU useless in any other car until its been re-keyed.)
The first time I heard of aftermarket ROMs (for the fuel injection computer) the car in question was the 1984 Pontiac Fiero, GM's short-lived (1984-1988, I think) mid-engined sports car.
-Tom Duff
Two points: ONE: most cars do NOT benefit from performance computers. TWO: most performance computers are added on to cars that are normally naturally aspirated and converted to turbo form. (a lot of cars that dont have turbos from the factory judge the amount of air with a vaccuum sensor instead of a mass air sensor) Often the relevant sensors dont even exist for the stock computer to talk to.
To make an example, the average honda civic computer settings are pretty much already maxxed out in stock form. You add an intake and an exhaust and youre still in the range that the stock computer can adjust for. You can actually add about half an atmosphere of boost (from turbo or supercharger) and still not need a custom computer. This applies to a most other non-turbo cars as well. Factory turbo cars have even higher limits.
Remember, modern cars have to be able to operate at 10,000 feet above and below sea level in a wide range of temperatures. Most cars have injectors that can take about 150% to 200% of stock duty before they begin to max out. Up to this point the car will still not even pollute!
Basically the only 2 ways to outpace the stock computer is to
1)bring in too little air at idle or have massively oversized injectors (the computer can't control the injectors to produce less than a certain minimum period of being open) which will cause "lopey idle" or stalling and rich emmissions.
2)bring in so much air at high rpm that the stock injectors can't let in enough fuel. Basically you will start to run "lean" (not enough fuel) which will produce very high temperatures and detonation (and kill your engine).
You basically only need a special computer if you are running massive cams (alternatively you could just raise the idle, which most people do) or if youre running such massive amounts of boost that the only solution is to run massive injectors (here again, you can actually just raise the idle). Now consider this: when youre making over double the stock hp, there is no way a factory computer is going to be able to cope anyway- I dont see the point of making them more hackable. On top of which, the only reason to use an expensive computer is to make the car more emissions friendly. And guess what mods are pretty much illegal under CARB rules? You guessed it! Programmable ECUs!!! The high-boost 323 and miata guys routinely run hacked ECUs with 12-15psi of boost, then turn down the boost and swap injectors for smog every two years. Its pretty sad that you have to break the law to pollute less.
The auto manufacturers have ALREADY made an attempt at encryption (by obsurity)....ergo, any attempt to plug in that non-factory code reader could be considered a violation, could it not?
I'd hate to have the auto industry start acting like the RIAA or the MPAA, but as soon as they see it "against their corporate interests," it's gonna be just like the Elmcomsoft/Dimitri S. all over again.....only now, they could check for hacking at the shop next time you bring the car in for a de-"tune" at the dealer......
Imagine how messed up things will be if Sen. Hollings get's his way......this would effectivly force all customers to "approved" shops to have their cars worked on.....
Just a thought......
Now if I can just hack my car to start somewhere in the first 200 tries...
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
Why would you waste your time hacking a car that fights you every step of the way (physically, electronically, and financially)? I only own and drive open sourced cars. My daily driver is a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle. There is not a single part for this car I couldn't write a check to replace. I also haven't paid a mechanic since I bought it. There're no computer diagnositics I have to pay some guy with his name on his shirt to run for me. All I need is a good chest full of Craftsman metric tools and my ears. Your stock Beetle not fast enough for you? $2000 worth of NEW parts will build a complete engine to your specifications that will propel that 870kg car to speeds you'd never thought possible. Countless books have been written that detail every system in the Beetle inside and out. Why would you buy a car that tries to keep you out with complex computerized systems? Want to modify the ignition timing? All you need is a 10mm socket. Ferdinand Porsche designed my car. Who designed yours?
Brandon D. Valentine
Large _tail_ pipes are cool, as they don't dull street performance, but large _exhaust_ diameters are bad news. They only function well at high RPM's and narrow power bandwidths. Gearing gets to be a major factor, and a PITA, if you're doing street.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Some cars roll out of the factor with overly retarded ignition. Sometimes simply advancing the ignition closer to TDC gives better performance. Lots of aftermarket chips do this. I don't understand why car manufacturers allow their vehicles to ship with these timings. Do you?
-ted
Regular people can do this too, you can get all kinds of chips and stuff for lots of diffrent cars. I don't know if this guy's just out of it or what.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Very well said. I also think that this could help lead to more hydrogen combustion engine cars. With more hackers having access to engine, exhaust, fuel, etc. data, combustion engines can be modified to run on hydrogen with little modification.
Hydrogen can be produced from water (not electrolysis which generally uses more power to produce the gas, but other methods which use less power to produce the gas than the power the gas produces) and power our cars cleanly. It would actually be safer, cleaner, and even give more power to engines. Go ahead, do some research.
Car hacking is just the beginning. Hacking is where all great ideas begin.
Question everything.
This meant no headlights, turn signals, radios, and no guages. Nothing. Which meant that the odometer didn't rack up miles. Perfect if you plan on selling the thing.
Heheh...
I imagine though that it would probably be just as easy to disconnect the cable in a normal odometer if you wanted to deceive. I'm not positive though.Older cars had a speedometer cable coming from the transmission tailshaft or transaxle to the gauge. The cable was merely a concentric cable in jacket, kinda like bicycle brake cable but meant to spin. For the most part, you could simply reach up behind the dashboard, feel around to the center of the back of the speedometer, and unclip the speedo cable from the gauge. A warning: this is a lot more difficult than it sounds, the contortions required to get your hand back there are nasty, there are probably live wires with some current (ie. headlight circuit, ammeter, etc) back there so make sure you take off any metallic jewelry, and stuff back there is fragile and expensive (big labor) to fix.
Don't disconnect the speedo cable at the transmission. The cable is usually driven directly by a gear, and it's kept lubricated inside the transmission oil. When you take off the cable, if you don't plug the hole in the transmission well, dust will get in there and lunch your transmission (to say nothing of the big leak messing up your driveway).
Because speedometer cables are expensive and heavy and the fuel injection system likes to know the car's speed so that it can better understand the engine load, most cars since about 1985 will have a Vehicle Speed Sensor. The VSS is attached to the side of the transmission exactly where the speedo cable would have come out. It uses optical sensors, hall effect sensors or magnetic pickup coils to create a pulsetrain relative to the speed of the car. The pulsetrain is then sent to the computer, the computer usually sends that on to the speedometer. Sometimes they're simply paralleled.
You could disconnect the VSS just by unplugging the wire. Most cars won't even notice it until there's an engine load (vacuum is lowered, throttle position and engine speed aren't idle) which could only be explained by movement. At that point, your Check Engine light will light up, and it probably won't go away until you reconnect the sensor. Sometimes it won't go out until you visit the dealership. And, unless the EFI computer reads the data coming from the ABS computer as a backup to the VSS, it's very unlikely that it will generate a signal to drive the speedo or the tach - though, based on engine speed and knowing what gear you're in, the computer could calculate and drive the speedo/odo to display accurate speed and mileage.
My best advice is, if you want to play with the EFI system (and VSS/Speedo/Odo as a consequence), find yourself an earlier (mid-80s) fuel-injected car on the way to the junkyard. Chevy Celebrity / Pontiac 6000 are common, cheap (about $200 if you find one with expired plates rusting in someone's laneway), durable and relatively easy to fix. The GM multiport and throttle body EFI systems are well documented all over the place because they're so popular, and variants were used across the entire product line in a given year.
Buy the car, take it home, start it up, and start pulling sensors to see what they all do!
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
My 525 HP Chevelle is stone cold reliable. It only requires the maintenance of any other car.
Of course if you build up an Audi engine to 400 HP, you'll break something every 5 minutes. And God knows what an engine like that costs.
In contrast, a big block chevy is the cheapest way to 500 HP (a small block chevy is the cheapest way to 350 HP but not 500), and the engines aren't radical at all.
For example, two recent Japanese motorcycles were so powerful and fast that the manufacturers "detuned" the engines at the prodding of various European governments
The bikes in question are the Suzuki Hayabusa and the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-12R
Badass bikes - I'd kill (you) for a GSX1300R
Writers imply. Readers infer.
No, overclocking your Honda will not make it run like a Trans Am.
And you can't just add a(nother) fan to keep it cool either.
(I envision a little 4-cylinder rolling down the road at 35mph, at around 11,000RPM in first gear... hood open for better ventilation.)
How cool would it be to add different skins to your instrument panel? I mean, the new high end cars nowadays have digital instrument panels..It could be done.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Scott Mueller's Upgrading And Repairing PCS (13th edition) includes a couple of sidebars on this subject. For some reason in the midst of a discussion about BIOS flashes he felt compelled to explain how flash capability is pretty common in controller ROMs in cars and went on to describe how his Chevy Impala is running a firmware flash that originally belonged to a Camaro; he even points to a few websites that describe the procedure. (It's late, so I'm not going to go digging through my copy right now, but anyone who's interested could email me tomorrow morning if they don't feel like googling for the sites...)
/brian
Just how many nutcases are there out hot-rodding those old rotary engines??
The rotary engine is a sweet deal, but I've had to rebuild them a bit too often. They just don't take the punishment that a good old leaky big block can handle.
As for computer systems in hot rods, I find it a waste of money on most of my hardware. I don't drive ricers, and I'm content on driving big heavy high horsepower beasts. Maybe I'll attempt to pull together my own fuel injection system, but I might as well not get in to that mess. (Even as an engineer).
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
They just want to make their pansy little box or car look faster.
Exactly. For clarity to those who don't know cars:
There's nothing like having some loser describing to you how quickly he can make his 1.6L Honda Civic go.
Imagine if you owned a Cray supercomputer and some child implied that his "tuned" 400MHz Celeron was in the same ballpark.
As the saying goes, there's no replacement for displacement. An engine is an air pump, the more air you suck through it per revolution, the more fuel you can mix with the air to achieve complete combustion. The more combustion, the bigger the explosion pushing the piston down, and the more power you get from the engine.
A 1.6L or whatever Honda is laughable in the face of a common Chevy 350 (5.7L) like you find in a Camaro or Caprice Classic, or in the face of a Ford 302 (5.0L) like in a Mustang, much less the Chrysler 440 (7.2L), Chevy 454 (7.4L) and King of Big-Blocks, the Chrysler 426 Hemi of the musclecar days.
Street racing is acceleration from a stoplight. That's called drag racing. There's a reason why those long and skinny drag racing cars with the huge fat tires (the cars are called "rail cars", the class of racing is Top Fuel drag) are rear-wheel-drive with big V8s, not front-wheel-drive with whiny little 4-cylinder engines.
Those racecars share more in common with my daily-driver 1976 Dodge pickup truck than does a typical ricer's car. My '76 Ram has a 400 (6.6L) V8 driving the rear wheels. With a curb weight of 4,000lb, it's about twice the weight of a Honda Civic. But 6.6L / 1.6L = 4.125 times more engine, and all other things being equal, 4.125 times the power. Into only twice the weight.
Needless to say, when an Integra with a big stereo pulls up beside me, I enjoy stomping on the gas pedal and showing him my taillights.
Modern EFI, overhead cams, combustion chamber design, etc., make incremental differences to improving the power, but a street car's engine is still built for gas mileage, durability and emissions, not for power, and the modern requirements for gas mileage and emissions choke the power potential of these modern improvements.
Those of us with real machines are quite content with our beige cases (in my case, a older, but still fast as all hell compaq proliant 8000 which was picked up dirt cheap from a dot com gone bust) and sleeper cars (also in my case, an Alpina).Indeed! My truck is forest green with rust and primer spots. Someday, I'll get around to painting it so that it looks nice again, but there won't be silly aftermarket rims or little blue lights on the windshield washer jets or clear tailights and big aluminum spoilers.
The car is either fast, or it isn't.
My truck gets 7 miles per gallon on the highway. The HC emissions are ~2 PPM, which is better than lots of 1986 cars, let alone 1976 trucks. I'm burning all that fuel. Where do you think it all goes?
Final thought. I tried Carroll Shelby's old trick. I taped a $20 bill to my dashboard, just in front of the passenger's seat. I had a disbeliever get in. I told him that, when the stoplight turned green, if he could grab that $20, it was his. He didn't get the $20.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
"They stared at me as though I'd just showed them a mouthful of partially chewed black beetles"
This is as good as the other article a few months ago where the guy said:
"As cool as the other side of the pillow."
Definitely two phrases I'm going to try and work into conversation, with proper attribution of course.
----
Please win this beer store.
Wax on, wax off baby!
Keven Warwick, celebrated hacker of self ignition, appears on Art Bell tonight.
Here in the UK, half or more new cars come with a 1-year warranty. Voiding it isn't much of an issue.
However, unless you disclose modificatins such as "chipping" to your insurance company, then you may find that your insurance is void. If you have a serious accident in a performance car, and they'll probably check under the bonnet for a different engine management chip. These are often soldered in place, and if the car is so seriously damaged to be undrivable, there's probably little chance of getting to the car to remove the evidence before the insurance company have a look.
From my point of view, having invalid insurance is much more serious than a crappy warranty running our.
Money implies poverty (Ian M. Banks)
10,000 ft below sea-level - whats this? Jules Verne's highway to the centre of the earth. The lowest place is less than a couple of hundred metres (600 ft) below sea-level.
I'd love to poke around with the diagnostics - perhaps even put an mrtg display somewhere and was wondering if anyone's done any GPL'd tools? Don't really want to fork the money for crappy wintel based closed source hacks when I suspect it would be pretty trivial to make a RS-232 based cable and write a simple perl/python/C module to interface to.
I don't own a car _without_ a modified computer.
The RX-7 has peculiar needs as far as air/fuel/ignition - I don't mess with the timing much, because detonation is not tolerated. It's touchy but rewarding.
The BMW, on the other hand, was detuned from original design, and thus much easier to just pull gobs of power out of, while still passing CA smog.
One of the reasons that people don't get power out of a chip (and most don't), is that they forgot that "tune" is a verb and not something that comes in a box.
For the average person, I'd say that they should just buy a faster car (handling is another matter, nobody but Ferrari does that right from the factory!). Unless you're willing to put a lot of time into it, slapping on a lot of parts is a bit of a crapshoot.
Standalone systems offer a lot of opportunities, but are generally not as able to handle varying conditions (fuel quality, for example) as stock computers.
As far as hacking into your Park Avenue with a PDA and turning it into a Corvette... Umm, No.
And yes, you can reduce engine life with thoughtless mods (or even radical thoughtful mods), but you can fall off half-dome, too. A blown engine is rarely fatal, and if it's that critical to you, don't mess with it.
As far as apex seals, this is an area I have some familiarity with. There are only two main ways you can blow an apex seal, mechanical failure (spring) and detonation. The former is extremely rare (didn't save me), the latter is controllable if you pay attention. And buy a J&S knock sensor.
Old rotary engines?!! Rotary Engine technology has come a LONG way since the 70's... and even more so since Mazda stopped importing the RX-7 in 95. The latest Rotary Engine rebuilders put in 3mm ceramic coated apex seals, ECU's that contain 3D reprogrammable fuel maps, boost controllers that employ fuzzy logic to activate the turbo's waste gate, ignition computers that increase spark, knock sensor computers that keep the engine from pinging/grenading, and intercoolers that cool 30-40% better with less pressure drop through them. Porting is now a fine art, and there are at least 20 different general ways to port a rotary. With minimal effort, and money ($3k-4k) you can get 300 horses and 300 ftlbs of torque out of a 13B-REW. Most tuner shops drop the stock twin turbos in favor of one large one, that pushes past the 500hp barrier... there have been a few that have 700 hp. And this is all with 1.3L 2 rotors. Those lucky engough to have 3 rotors (imported from japan) start out with 400 hp, and go up from there!
<sidenote>I'm putting down 313 Rear Wheel Horse Power, and 301 ftlbs or torque with basic bolt on 'hacks' (mods)...(Here is my dyno sheet) Intake, exhaust, intercooler, and computer. I replaced the engine at 130,000 miles because a vacuum hose popped off my wastegate, and caused the turbos to boost well past 15lbs, with no extra fuel to compensate... ping! Apex seal blew. I'm now at 150,000 miles, zip-tied vacuum hoses, and have had nothing but dependable and fun to drive Mazda Zoom Zoom-y-ness </sidenote>
Mazda is re-introducing the rotary later this year with the RX-8. Now called the RENESIS, the engine is a non-turboed multi-side-port 1.3L rotary, that is projected to put out 255-280 HP . The computer should be easy to hack, and a turbo kit will be available shortly after the introduction of the car. I would estimate about +330 HP from a turboed RENESIS.
1.3L, 3 moving parts, 280 HP, no Turbos, wanna Race? RotaryNe
Man, if you want a fast car, there's no beeting american Musle© There's nothing like the sound of a 400 mouser or a 454 rat under the hood of a comero or chevelle© And there's nothing faster either© It's a matter of waight ratios© If you can somehow tune your six banger with a turbo to say 250HP and you are say a ton and a quarter© And I have a 454 putting out 550HP ¥naturaly asperated I might add, and weight in at a heafty two tons© I still have more power per pound then you, and hence I'm faster© Rice rockets suck, and anyone who beggs to differ, can watch as I pass them©
Maybe numero uno, but not the only one
Writers imply. Readers infer.
hahahhaahaha
Mustang and other ford fanatics have been messing with their computers for years now.
There are all sorts of realtime management systems as well as piggyback chips that you can plug into your cars computer and flip a switch for different settings.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
"My Honda Integra Type R manages about three-four times the power of your big-iron block at the same rev range, not to mention around the same torque."
ROFL! You do realize that HP is a function of torque at a particular RPM right? Ummm... Not too many 4 bangers have v8 torque at ANY rpm let alone the same rpm.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I've been into cars as long as I can remember, and have been getting more and more serious about the performance side of things. Genetically, I've been somewhat cursed as being both a geek and a jock, so naturally I've gravitated into cars and other things that go fast. (I just bought my first motorcycle, a Honda CBR600F4i)
:) Even the dsm.org site is Linux powered.
I started off in a Camaro Z28, and quickly became dissapointed with their build quality and reliability. I then moved into imports, and have never looked back. I now drive an Eagle Talon, which falls into a group of cars known as DSM's. These cars are pretty amazing considering the oldest ones are 13 years old. They are highly detuned from the factory, and have essentially the same engine as the Lancer Evolution, a high performance 4-door car which has had a lot of success on the WRC circuit. There are lots and lots of fast ones, most of which are daily drivers. The big dogs in DSM drag racing are pushing close to 800 HP and 30+ PSI through a measly 2.0 litre 4 banger.
The industry support for these cars, though not up to the levels of the Honda Civic or any of the domestic sports cars, is amazing. For instance, I use my Palm Pilot with the DSM Pocketlogger to aid in tuning-- I can get everything from coolant temperature, to knock counts all from my Palm. I can also do things such as turn injectors on and off from the Palm to test them. As far as some more hacking goes, I have an HKS VPC which essentially lets me use a less restrictive way to monitor my airflow, as well as trick the ECU (the car's computer) into thinking that conditions are always optimal. Piggybacked on that, I have an Apex-I Super AFC which essentially lets me tell the ECU how much fuel I need, and at what RPM's. I also have an Greddy Profec B Electronic Boost Controller which lets me adjust the amount of boost my turbo runs.
My primary attraction to these cars initially were that they were AWD (I live in Colorado). Once I learned more about them and their potential, I was hooked. I think the thing I like about them the most is that they are the underdog, since they don't have anything near the displacement of Joe 6-pack's muscle car, and that they use brains instead of brawn to get their power. To me the most impressive car which was imported into the US was the Toyota Supra, but that's a whole other topic.
Anyhow, if you're interested in getting a car that you can 'hack', you could probably pick up one of these cars for around $3K. Warning-- it's a very expensive and addictive hobby. My motorcycle is just over a week old, and I've pretty much got all of the parts picked out I'll be buying once my refund check finally gets here... since its fuel injected (still somewhat rare in the 2 wheeled world), it will require some electronic hacking for a new exhaust and intake.
On a side note, in the local chapter of Club DSM, I'd say at least 75% of us are techies to some degree (EE's, SysAdmins (both NT and Unix guys), programmers, etc.). Collectively we can generate some very interesting conversations, though I've heard that the discussions of the Audi elite make us look pretty dumb.
You can check out my car here, and more about DSM's here.
It's pretty useful in the US as well. The East Coast may have mountains similar to Europe, but western US mountains, and mountain passes, are fairly high. Los Angeles, for example, even though the city is at sea level, has 10,000 foot mountains 20-30 miles away, and some of the passes through those mountains have 7-8000 foot elevations. Colorado, which in parts is fairly well-populated, has several 10-11,000 foot passes which people regularly travel across. As a result of this, auto manufacturers have to tune their cars to handle a wide range of atmospheric pressure.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Still doesn't explain the below sea level part...
Aw man.. I thought it said "Hack your imagination.. before someone else does"
" I neither endorse nor recommend any of the procedures mentioned"
I do, it's a lot of fun, but along with your laptop to reprogram it, you need a device to measure performance improvements also. You can't judge yourself if you got +5hp or lost 5 due to your changes in configuration.
And while your at it, you need to remember that different air temperature and the amount of water in the air, changes the performance of the engine.
I have built a cold air intake for my engine, shielded the intake from heat from the engine the car already had a pipe all the way to the front to ensure it picked it up from the outside.
A cold damp, foggy morning does wonders in terms of performance, it's something my car really like. Of course one needs to find the perfect place to drive where the road isn't slippery.
Then of course there is my NOS installation (Nitro Oxide System) another nice little hack, with adds +50% horse power when accel. could get +75% or more, but I would like my engine to last 50.000 before changing it.
Note, that all these changes and improvements of the engine og course changes the specs so much that it is not legal anymore for street use. Just in case you care.
I suppose people are already familiar with Controlled Area Networks in Autos. I have been told(and not lazily verfied) that a company called Vector holds some kinda monopolistic hold over CAN bus technology.
The idea of running an IP network in a car is not new. I know of atleast one R&D project at our Uni which is done by "Institute of Communication Networks and Computer Engineering" which investigates among other things, developing a communication architecture in an auto...the research to run an IP network on Das Auto! Read more
here
I am sure there are other projects like this taking place elsewhere as well.
It seems soon internet will find its way to our carburtors!!
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
He came across an Audi that altered the ignition timing to make the engine quieter when the electric windows were down
Nearly all cars do a pattern recognition to see when they are doing the EU fuel economy test, and then put the engine into a more economic, lower performance mode
Whilst I think the first item is quite neat (depending upon what else it did to the performance/economy), the second is a pretty dirty trick IMO...
I never thought someone was able to HACK a car to MOD it! :)) hahahha geek terms... now I need to buy myself a car so I can overclock it to 200 mph! :))
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
And if anyone is stupid enough to try this they are going to look pretty stupid ( and guilty ) when the dealer goes into the car's computer and finds the real mileage which was being concurrently accumulated. duh.
10,000 below is easy if you have one of those white Lotus Elises...
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
Hack 1 - The exhaust
:)
Most people seem to think that simply sticking a chromed 3" can on the end of their exhaust will magically make the car faster. *sigh*
Instead, try a Morrison Collector (sometimes called a "resonator"). We've found that with the right calculations (look it up), and appropriate engineering (tip, weld a bolt into the middle of the resonator and weld washers on either end on the outside) you can gain 20% (power or performance... it's your foot, not mine)
This was done on a 1960s Volvo and a 1990s Lada Niva. Works very, very well. Can be noisy if you don't do it right.
Hack 2 - The Fuel Injection
So, your carby has worn out. Your car is over 25. What do you do?
Well, you take a 1974 VW Passat TS, and a fuel injection system from a Holden (what model was it again? a 2lt 4cyl motor anyway), and a little welding later, you have fuel injection. Wow. WOW. WOOOOOO! That certainly gave it some grunt, and boy does it idle nicely now
We also applied this to the Lada... though we fitted a Lada Australia MPI system to it.
Later when we trashed the lada we took that same MPI system and put it on a Fiat X1/9. Wow. WOW. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Hack 3 - Tyres/suspension/brakes
Most people underestimate the importance of offset. They seek a wide tyre, and don't understand just how crap their car feels afterward.
I put 14x6" rims on my 1979 VW Golf Diesel. Up from 13x5". I couldn't go wider because the rims would have the wrong offset and the car would have behaved nastily.
We made a couple of mods to the Lada's suspension... by far the most successful and interesting was moving the trailing arm links on the rear axle up by about 2". That really helped damp it's tendancy to drift when doing 160km/h over corrugated roads.
Hack 4 - Port and Polish
We spent a lot of time rebuilding the motor in my Golf. (yanks know these cars as "rabbits"). We did a very, very careful job of porting the head, including benchtop flow tests. Took over a month, but the result was well worth it. 5l/100km in average driving conditions. It could comfortably cruise on 140km/h constant (where it it the govenor), and you could feel it power up as it started to climb hills.
Hacking your car isn't about making it pretty, that's just hoons trying to pull chicks the only way they know how. Hacking your car is about pushing the limits. It's about doing something different. There's squillions of drag-modded torana's out there. Everyone knows how to do that.
But who of you has hacked a diesel engine?
Put fuel injection on a Massey Fergusson 35 tractor?
Spent months researching exhaust tuning? (and not just stuck a bigger pipe on, but used some SCIENCE!)
Be different. Don't be a rice boy, don't be yet another bogon that feels a V8 is the ultimate in technology, and NEVER, NEVER accept leaf spring suspension. On anything but an authentic horse-drawn carriage, it's WRONG.
Mates don't let mates use leaf spring suspension.
-- James "Bragi" Deucker Patrician of Networks
Oh, the ignition reference was to timing...
Everyone familiar with the "computerized keys" (resistor embedded in key) on modern cars that authenticates prior to ignition? Pretty slick security feature to stop those nasty car thief guys, right?
How about when someone causes your PCM (thats Powertrain Control Module to non-gearheads) to learn a new ignition key inside of 30 minutes? There is a dead simple, documented (see also Google.com) way for a car thief to drive away with their modern car of choice after jimmying a door or trunk lock. Of course, the car manufacturers bet that any thief who hangs around for 30 minutes is going to look suspicious.
Also on the subject of "reverse engineering" the component comm protocols.. what do they mean it can't be done? See also: AutoTap, EZ Link scanner, ScanMaster, GM's Tech2 and a dozen PalmOS utilities. The point of the OBD diag port on modern cars (and I mean manufactured after 1982) is to provide a single standardized interface to every parameter you *want* to tune.
True, most consumer tools only allow basic procedures like clearing trouble codes, readiness tests, OBD(-II) data monitoring, etc. but "serious" hacking can be done with the right cable and software. Hypertech created a business around their little ECM/PCM reprogrammer, even.
I don't know much of the history, but the folks over at www.hondata.com reverse engineered the ECU in the majority of Honda's from the 1990s.
The program was then reengineered to allow for the modification of all the fuel maps, ignition timing maps etc. This allows tuners to bolt on parts, and change specifications without having the computer try to counteract the changes in the name of emissions and fuel economy. There is also datalogging built in which allows me to monitor all the sensors in the car. In my case, it allows me to run a supercharger on my Honda Civic with 8psi, and have it run RIGHT!
In my opinion, its far better than standalone engine management computers (such as MOTEC, etc) for daily driving. It allows us to take advantage of years of Honda development and research, and still tweak to our hearts content.
...and besides, I get to keep a laptop in my car ALA The Fast and the Furious (quite possibly the worst movie ever BTW)
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has many web pages on what the chips in your car know about you and the crash you just had, starting at http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/edr-site/
RPMs.
If it revs to 14,000 rpm reliably you'll get twice as much juice as you would at 7,000.
This is why Honda used to make six cylinder 24 valve 250s for racing, etc.
And while it isn't applicable to cars, two-strokes make twice as many power pulses per revolution as four-strokes do. You haven't lived until you've cracked the throttle open on a Kawasaki H2. One second later you're making as much power as a Harley at red-line with one third the weight. Hang on tight. Of course the thing never wants to go in a straight line 8-o.
BTW, I drive a 2-liter, 8-valve normally asperated VW GTI. Yeah it could go faster with different ignition and fuel maps, but I can't be bothered.
However with a shot of NOS or a correctly sized turbo you might just find hat smaller engines can make torque. I've got a 3liter straight six that made 390RWHP and 427ftlbs that was all done by 7K. That was running WAY rich too (shrug). Engines are air pumps, a smaller engine boosted with enough added air can indeed catch up with a V8....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
("Sir, your OBD and your EDR indicate that you drive at a steady 75 mph, which is illegal, that you fail to change your oil at the correct intervals, that you drive one-handed while using your cell phone and pick your nose at red lights. This voids your warranty.")
-Brock Yates
All Eyes On Me
85% of Americans think this signature sucks
Friends of mine race 600cc motorcycles & they use an aftermarket programmable ignition/injection box. The cool thing is that this box can talk to a dyno through its serial port. This means that you can put the bike on the dyno & let the dyno try different settings until your curves are optimized. Used to take 8 hours of someone sitting there revving it, now you can go drink coffee for an hour & you're done. (Of course, building the engine still takes a lot of time, money & knowledge.)
ard to find harnesses I'm told but I know of at least one late model 4valve Cobra running it. SVO\Motorsport assists aftermarket manufacturers. They get a bit upset when you get into redistributing parts of th eEEC source with your stuff but they're not too bad otherwise fro mwhat I've seen. Mike Wesley ran into some problems for them but that was partly because he used to help design the hardware he was hacking...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
400 hp.
You have go from 2 k03 turbos to 2 k04 turbos.
The comms aren't often encrypted that I'm aware of but the FIRMWARE IS in many late model cars these days. GM has encrypted theirs, I'm pretty sure Ford has, I'd bet that BMW has too. They spend zillions developing these systems, the encryption helps protect them and keep "hackers" out. They often fail though :-) How many car manufacturers are going to reverse the firmware after a bad accident BTW? Not many I'd bet. However supposedly later model Vette's store a limited data set that can be retrieved after an accident - things like speed and throttle position. Not seen that 100% verified though - possible RUMINT.
Now that ECUs are FLASH programmable it's possible to modify things quite nicely once you've got it figured out. This is both good and bad for the manufacturer since warranty claims can go up if someone screws up but then reverts it bck to the old programming. It's good though in that every engine is different and they can tweak in the field a bit.
Suggest you look into LT1EDIT and the new LS1EDIT. OBDII requirements have actually made the ECUs more powerful and this is allowing for lots of playing around.
On the other hand, companies like AEM, FAST, DFI (GenVII), Electromotive, Holley (Commander), Haltech, and Motec are making complete standalone systems that are pretty powerful to include closed loop part throttle - and even closed loop WOT with off the shelf WB O2 sensors. The AEM computer will be PnP for many cars including the Supra and RX7 that I own.
Honestly, this article really didn't tell us jack shit. The world of aftermarket EFI is HUGE as is the market for hacking OEM stuff. This article made it sound like this was new - I laughed. ell new ECUs control the transmission and are being modified. Engine swaps with this stuff are also popular. skip the emissions, have a clean fast car, and it starts every time with good MPG. What's not to like?
P.S. OBDII and OBDIII have provisions to spot tampering. New emissions inspections could even require plugging in for an ECU check. Ways to get around tripping these on OBDII are aleady being reseached. Som o thethings put forth for OBDIII (to include remote kill) have been pretty scary coming from our clueless legislators. Support SEMA!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
That not only aren't car dealers "smarter" than the aftermarket folks but that many of them actively help us right? What, you think the dealer is some clean hospital like bastion? Those mechanics are car nuts too! Set a flag? Okay, reset it using an OBD scanner. Thanks for playing!
Many of those flags are reset by dumping power to the ECU although with OBDII there are some that are persistant - but can stil be reset with the proper tools. SnapOn and others sell these tools as do the dealers. They must, the manufacturers tried to make this all proprietary and the Govt. told them they oculdn't. There are even standards for this stuff....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
You can still advance and retard igntion wholesale on newer vehicles, it's just a little harder is all. Hint: move the sensor that detects crank position. Thye make devices for this.
So why do it? First of all it's safe. Whoever told you it wasn't was smoking crack. So long as the engine isn't detonating and you didn't get real stupid chances are you will pick up power. OEMs are conservative with their ignition curves - they never know when some dumbass will put Regualr gas in the car and drive it hard with the motor detonating like popcorn. Advancing the ignition a few degrees on MANY cars will restore power the OEM decided not to give you. To do it right though someone qualified should do it through the chip since wholesale changes moving the distributor or sensor are pretty "brute force". Sometimes an engine really doesn't want the added ignition (shrug).
MSD, Crane, Jacobs, Mallory, and others produce multispark ignitions. MSD and Holley are also producing digital ignition systems for less power draw and higher reliability. Just don't weld on th ecar with one hooked up (ahem). This stuff has been around for years and yes some of them can even manage your ignition for you - overriding the OEM spark if you would like....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I passed a guy the other day (in Durham, NC) that has the license plate "/dev/car" ... just thought the Slash crowd would find that a little funny.
That's the same attitude big block drag racers had in the 60's, right before they got their doors blown off on the track by the humble little Empi Inch Pincher VW.
Spot on, you know about this stuff. Have yo ulooked at the AEM PnP systems? Just now coming out these will plug into your existing harness, use your existing systems, have additional I/Os, and be FULLY programmable. hese beat the ApexI unitshands down - ApexI will NOT release their software for programming their units with a laptop or to do datalogging. Only their "partners" get this software! Their boxes cost as much as the AEM unit.
;-)
Holley has a good box with the Commander, one of their engineers regularly posts on a GM forum. FAST has another good one too. Wide Band O2 sensors are becoming cheaper thanks to LEV vehicles using them OEM (thanks Honda!). Look at the DIY-O2 project over in OZ for a cheap way to build a display\sensor or just buy one from them built. FAR less than the $800+ Motec wants - using the SAME sensor.
You're correct about rolling your own too. The DIY-EFI guys do it for fun but honestly it's too much work for me. Modding an older GM box is also pretty easy but compared to the aftermarket and new OEM FLASH programmable stuff I don't see myself doing it.
Imagine, boost, transmission, fuel, spark, traction, and datalogging all in a box costing less than $2K. That's the AEM with the DFI GEN VII, FAST, and Holley systems not too far behind. Software demos for many of these can be downloaded. Electromotive's new box looks interesting too but I'm not real sure about them these days
Good post, glads I'm not the only gearhead on today who's looked at this stuff...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
www.shiftmaster.com has a small board that hooks up to the service port on the car's processor and then you hook up the other end to a laptop. you can change ignition timing, air fuel ratio, fuel pulsewidths, fan turn on temp, shift points, rev limiters, speed limiters, egr control, filter out check engine lights, mass air function....and about 400 other things. it's all there, the whole entire processor is mapped out..there's even a GUI that will display 3D graphs based on x/y/z..spreadsheat control so you can enter in formulas...etc you make the changes according to the modification's/data logging(with Autotap or wideband o2) you've done and click download..put the laptop away and drive off... it's actually not that easy to tune a car yourself..you still need to know a TON of internal EEC-V information..formulas, encoding..etc..but there's a great source of info on the EEC-TUNER group on Yahoo. i've managed to dyno at 255rwhp at 5500 rpm and 254RWTQ at 4600 rpm with my 97 V6 Mustang! running a vortech supercharger at 11psi, 36# injectors, split port heads, 80mm lightning maf.. among many other things$$$ all i can say is that the eec-tuner is a wonderfull tool, my car would have not been running without it...it's been around for almost 3 years....
Rock and Roll, Bro!!!!!!!
:-)
Back in my day, I used to hate big-block Mopar cars.... only because I had a 1970 Ford Torino Cobra with the 429CJ in it and my rival had a 1968 Dodge Charger with a 440 engine that came out of a wrecked highway patrol car (originally had a 383 2bbl that threw a rod). This was my senior year in high school.... more years ago that I care to mention. We'd go out and race them every Friday and Saturday on a country road just outside town. About half the time he'd win and the other half I'd win.... until I finally saved up enough money to buy a huge-ass Holley 850 double-pumper and big electric fuel pump to keep it fed for my 429CJ Torino, then I could consistantly beat him in the quarter mile and top end too. Both our cars were mostly stock otherwise except for the usual wheels & tires, carb and exhaust mods, etc. After school on Friday afternoons, we'd both drive out to a rural cropduster airstrip and fill our tanks with 115/145 purple aviation gas and advance our ignition timing a few more degrees and then become an absolute menace to society for the rest of the weekend. Looking back in time, it was absolute insanity to allow a couple of crazy wild teenage boys to be turned loose on the streets with 400 horsepower cars, but that was a different era for sure. Ahhhh, those were the good old days. Wish I could go back and do it all over again
Audi W12 420 BHP luxury sedan and
VW W12 recordholder 600BHP.
Like having a twin engine V6 under your hood.
4 bangers just NEVER sound cool.
I beg to differ. The Subaru WRX is equipped with a 4-cylinder boxer, and it sounds pretty damn cool.
mmmm... turbo.
Easy to find, not terribly expensive, but some gotchas that you have to be aware of. Good stuff overall IMO.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
What he's talking about is so far behind the definition of "new" or "cutting edge" that it's kind of absurd. He talks about "monitoring the network" and essentially replacing the relatively static firmware with something that can be manipulated by the user. This is not even new technology, and is universally employed by "tuning" enthusiasts (a la "The Fast and The Furious"). Laptops are used to log data about what is taking place in the car and the engine, and a programmable ECU replaces or overrides the stock one. Without this, it would be impossible to do things like add turbochargers to cars that weren't intended to have them in the first place. The examples I have in the links above are from just one store that caters to Miatas only; there are many options from many manufacturers for many cars.
I've participated in conversations where someone is essentially trying to debug their "map," or set of engine configuration options in the software, and where others chime in and offer to help. I've seen disucssions of which software is better, and so on. And again, this is all old news, not even cutting edge.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Take your basic 4th gen Supra TT. Clean up the exhaust system to flow better, add an air intake, bypass a MAP sensor to remove boost cut, pull a hose under the hood. Result? 390RWHP and 427flbs all day long. Mid 12s if you can hook, a little tuning will net 11s. This is a drive everyday car that will run circles around a big block in the MPG dept. It will retain all ammenaties like A/C and power windows. Want more power? Dump the stock turbos and put ona single - can you say 600RWHP? Not crank, at the wheels. Some are pushing 900+ on the stock block but the internals are worked.
;-)
Hrm, and many of thse "rice rockets" weigh FAR less than a Chevelle. I also own a TT RX7 and while it makes less power than the Supra it flat out flies due to less weight. It's as modified as I'm willing to go but with the right parts it's got lot's more in it. That's 1.3liters BTW.
You're right - it's about power to weight! That's why I've got a V8 in a 2500lb Datsun 240Z in the garage. Bye Bye!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
"Physical hot rodding isn't cheap because it often involves the inadvertent testing to destruction of new ideas and components. Digital hot rodding, though--where software is used to modify how a vehicle does something--is orders of magnitude cheaper and far more accessible."
I'm not sure about this... It is just as easy to throw a rod by changing your timing digitally as it is to break your engine with a new physical component.
Elpenor
"You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means..." Inigo Montoya
Thats right folks. As you park your car you plug into the parking lot/garages network and CLUSTER TIME!!!
Then the real fruitcakes could have theirs set-up to try and cure some horribly evil VIRUS! Can you imagine it? Driving down the road and curing disease all at the same time!
Razzious Domini
I could be a GREAT KARMA WHORE if I could just shed the few morals I have left.
I don't even have to bother hacking, I just go to MidAmerica (http://www.madvet.com/) or Eckler's (http://www.ecklers.com/) and buy a drop in PROM already engineered for performance.
Old news, at best.
There is a company that used to have a product called CarCop that combined a cell phone, GPS system, with monitoring and control of the vehicle systems to detect theft, breakdowns, etc. The system has access to all of the data carried on the vehicle buses and control of all of the vehicle systems accessible via the buses. So they can tell when the car is running, whether it is moving when the engine is not running, and can disable the ignition switch, lock or unlock the doors, etc.
After failing to sell this in the public sector they switched to fleet sales where it is a big hit with corps needing to monitor vehicles.
It is also making a comeback as the OnStar system
They also made the sale to mortgage and leasing companies specializing in high risk loans and leases. The deal the leasing company makes with the consumer is that they will approve the lease or loan if this special module can be installed in the car. The module is used to track the car to prevent theft and to disable the car should the consumer get behind in payments.
You're forgetting the two tools of the trade which are used daily to pump put huge amounts of power:
Turbo's and Superchargers.
Let's say your 1.6l Civic makes 130hp stock. Throw on some bolt on aftermarket parts, you might get it up to 145hp. Really do to town on it, tear it down and build it back up with the intention of making lots of horsepower and you'll get close to 200hp.
Now throw on your typical turbo kit with ~6-7 lbs of boost. Instant 60hp gain. Now you're pushing close to 200hp with just about no loss of mileage under normal driving conditions. Yes, you'll still get 37mpg cruising the freeways!
Now that little Civic is a real threat to your big Dodge with a weight/hp ratio just about equal. And you don't have to feel guilty about burning a gallon of gas on the way to the grocery store.
Now, how long until the music publishing conglomerates "get it"?
- Barrie
As the saying goes, there's no replacement for displacement... A 1.6L or whatever Honda is laughable in the face of a common Chevy 350 (5.7L)
How about compared to a 3L engine of a Formula One car? You might get off the line quicker, but it won't be long before the F1 car catches up. Same for a race motorcycle that, guess what, doesn't have a 5L engine.
No, it's all all about displacement. It's about power-to-weight ratio.
Megasquirt is a stand alone fuel injection controller. The Megasquirt is a diy project that could be adapted to many engine applications.
Another good reference is diy-efi.org.
Both of these sites offer projects that would be smaller scaled and could be relativly cheap. Of course after mastering a diy efi you may be inclined to open up your daily driver!
One thing that's not often realized or acknowledged by many mech hackers on thier way to becoming gearheads is that the hackability of cars varies quite a bit. Accordingly (no Honda pun intended), all hacks involve tradeoffs. You may be able to squeeze another 15 HP out of that 4-banger, at the cost of shortening it's life considerably. (And grenading those expensive upgrade parts in the process...) Optimizing these tradeoffs is not easy.
Case in point: Really high performance cars are hard to hack. This just makes sense if you think about it. The simple fact is that what separates high performance cars from their more proletarian brethren is that they have *already* been "pre-hacked" to improve performance. The law of diminishing returns definitely applies here. Hot-rodding Ferraris, Porsches, Vipers, and Cobras is *hard* simply because all the easy, high bang-for-the-buck stuff has already been done, and then some. What's left is almost by definition in the "not worth the money" category. (Of course, that doesn't stop the legion that has more money than sense, especially if they can afford these cars in the first place. These people ruin a lot of good cars.) If you want to hack for hacking's sake, start with something other than the top end, unless you like low ROI. Otherwise, buy a fast car and enjoy it with no or minor tweaks.
There are cars out there that are designed with very conservative safety/durability margins that are eminently hackable. (RX-7s come to mind, as do Miatas, Mustangs and GM F-bodies. The new Focus is shaping up to be a really good candidate, perhaps becoming the Datsun 510 of this decade, but Ford, as usual, makes it hard to order all the right bits.) Also, don't forget the time-tested method of getting the big win: engine swaps. If you choose a bigger engine from the same manufacturer, these are often not even all that difficult, and usually (at least until you break out the "blue-tip wrench") offer a fall-back position, if things don't work.
Although little Japanese motors can be hacked, I don't think many of them are practical hacks, since you quickly have to start upgrading everythign else once you've started. Thisis why there's still a lot of truth in the old hot-rodder's saying, "There are two ways to win: cubic inches, or cubic dollars." V8s and engine swaps remain popular because they offer the former. I'd put most Asian hacks in the latter category, and if you're going to do that, why not just buy a fast car in the first place, as it will almost always produce superior results?
Remember one last thing: Power is your friend, weight is you enemy. Very few hot-rodders put much effort into weight reduction (and it's hard on many modern cars), but keep that in mind when buying a car - A Miata is relatively at least as hackable as a Mustang because of this. Starting light and going lighter can make a tremendous difference. If you really want light, buy a Lotus: Colin Chapman once said he designed Lotus race cars with the following in mind: "The perfect car disintegrates as it crosses the finish line." *That's* performance optimization, gentlemen.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Years ago I was into the "Turbo Dodge" cars from the 80s. These could have HUGE horsepower gains from reprogramming the engine computer. You could get a pre-reprogrammed one from Mopar, but the best option was to get one custom-programmed for your particular car's stats.
:)
The main reason it was difficult to do was because you needed an eeprom burner, and few people have those, so everybody paid this one guy who would program the computers for the Mopar Dodges, named Neil...
Now with the newer cars that have been announced running Windows CE, I bet all of this just got easier... as well as crashing them getting easier
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
It doesn't matter if it's cars or computers man. ;)
It still gets me going
--- Do you believe in the day?
I just want to replace my on-board diagnostics port with something useful... like maybe SNMP. Seriously, who creates an interface standard that specifies a connector but not the electrical characteristics of the connector? Give me 9600 or 19200 bps data from a 9-pin RS-232 connector in a standard, well-documented format. I should be able to download the MIBs for a Honda Accord to my laptop, plug it in to the port, and watch all of the engine parameters in a standard viewer.
Check it out - www.pocketlogger.com - they make some palm software and line level converter cable so that I can hook my palm directly to my ECU. It'll log all the important stuff at about 20 Hz, and display it in realtime with fancy graphs. I can output things like RPM over time to a csv file, so with a little logic, total vehicle weight, gear ratios, tires sizes, and the assumption that my AWD is hooking up, I could even plot approximate hp and torque curves for each gear after a run.
:)
I can play with the injector settings and various solenoids too, but can't actually reprogram the ignition or fuel maps, but that's OK. On these 1g DSM's, all you have to do is mess with the wastegate solenoid line in order to increase the turbo boost. Very fun car - can't wait to try some rallying in it!
Plus, imagine how cool it'll be to have a Palm velcroed to the dash beside the Empeg, happily churning out graphs of engine data!
One more thing - engine size is one thing, but induction is another. This little 2l 4 cyl turbo makes 195 hp stock. Double the boost pressure, and it makes a lot more - can you say four wheel power slide? I like it. Plus the car is a Laser - it doesn't look like much to the rice boys, at least until the turbo spools.
If you go here you can find the assembly code readouts for most GM cars. These are really well documented, and this is how I tune my Firebird.
Modern GM cars come with what is called a memcal. This plugs into the ECM, and it contains the PROM, some filter networks for the knock sensor, and some basic circuitry to run in 'limp home mode' if the PROM fails.
There are people retrofitting these systems to every possible configuration, the most popular is the Buick Grand National/SyTy/Turbo Sunbird ECM because it supports boost conditions, or the 90-92 Firebird ECM because they are so easy to find.
There is even an open source tuner program for Firebirds and Camaros to watch the ALDL datastream and see everything that is going on inside your engine.
It's a real hacker culture, and I enjoy reading all the discussions that go on.
I've got an '94 LT1 in my '86 Jaguar XJS. It runs 14sec 1/4mi at ~100mph. Crosses the finish line in 2nd gear (running 2.88 gears) and can get over 30mpg with long hwy driving. Car computer hacked with LT1Edit by Carputing.
100 miles to the gallon, too!
If the fan belt breaks I use a rubber band!
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
"Some specialized in primarily cosmetic changes, others in drag-strip performance or stock car racing, while others went on to create their own designs from scratch, often using off-the-self parts as source materials."
There's a company called Technomotive that does ECU upgrades for the Talon/Eclipse/Laser trio of cars. What makes them different is that their upgrade "Stages" include an ECU lockout that prevents starting the car until a certain pedal combination is pressed, using the factory boost gauge for O2 sensor read-outs/injector duty cycle/spark advance among other things, removal of ECU imposed limits. The coolest mod of all, a "stutterbox" that lets you floor the car at the drag strip line and limit your revs to your optimal launch point. When you pop out the clutch the stutterbox is disengaged, your revs are unleashed and you launch like a bat out of hell. The guy(s) behind the company started it as a total hobby, dumping ECU instructions, etc, and ended up building a laptop-based data logger that can capture/control all of the engine's inputs and outputs. The website for the Talon/Eclipse/Lasers is at DSM.org and is one of the first that I know of that used MySQL and modperl.
yesterday we went to the local dealer to ask about RX-8 or getting on a list or something... apparently won't be available this year.
I regret getting rid of my RX-2s and RX-3s. I never bought an RX-7 - didn't like 'em.
I CAN'T WAIT for RX-8!!!
Nice how this sparked a discussion about everything but what the article is accually about. So... in usual /. fasion I will post good techical info, lets see if it gets ignored.
CAN (controller area network) bus, seems to be mostly what he was taking about, and the hint that the information is public? Try this site about CAN. It is an ISO standard and is used for everything from automobile's to factory automation. The author of the above site doesn't have the ISO docs but he does have some good pdf's. If your interrested in tools or more info there is of course google google.
This guy does not know what he is talking about. I used to write firmware for engine and transmission controllers. The parameters for the performance limits are usually burned into an eeprom or flash chip on the controller board somewhere.
How can you burn data into an eeprom/flash if you don't know the proper commands? How can you reverse engineer the command if you don't see it on the bus? It is not possible. These controllers are black boxes that can not be reverse engineered. You need to have schematics and source code and documentation to modify the parameters, to know the format the parameters are stored in memory and where they are stored.
I like hacking the CD changer bus to allow you to control many gigs of mp3s instead of 6 lowly CDs, like PhatNoise.
I rather have my comfortable and quality car than a shitty little rice car.
My BMW weighs more than your shitty acura or whatever because it uses metal instead of plastic where it is needed. It uses leather instead of cloth or vinal. It uses quality parts, instead of shitty little plastic trinkets. Aluminum instead of thin thin steal.
Take a look at any jap sports car. They are cheaply made, and are filled with plastic. They are cramped and uncomfortable.
For example, take out a window motor, or a sunroof motor (if you have one) from both your rice burner and a german car. The German car will utilize low gauge wire instead of chicken wire, and the housing will be metal instead of plastic. Do you know why? Because Bosch makes quality parts that last, not shit that falls apart in the box like japs do.
Compare anything that is made in both japan and made in europe. See which falls apart first.
Connect the car and the world with TCP/IP?
If these engineers can't imagine that anyone would want to hack their own system, what about other peoples systems? Does the car have a static ip address? How long do you think it will be before cars are moving without anyone stepping on the gas?
I bolted a new Civic to a 70's Vette, and then attached them both to the side of a porsche (the porsche is for handling, the vette is for power, and the Civic has a 9 " exhaust tip that just looks Uber cool)
"I just upgraded my chip to the super XP111 and updated the rom with luvgrl69's modded version I got in the chatroom, I kick ass"
"Watch me take this corner man!"
"OMFG!! luvgrl gave me the UGotNOBrakes virus!!"
I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls
/.
I have a car with at least 40 separate processors connected to an internal network, that is currently getting 43 miles to the gallon (I expect to hit 50 mpg in warmer weather), seats five, accelerates briskly from a light, and has not only digital readouts but also a centrally mounted touch screen that I can run diagnostics from.
OK, I admit it... IT CAME THAT WAY FROM THE FACTORY! Go buy a Toyota Prius today, it's a three month waiting list and $20,000 US but the price is going to go way, way up as soon as Detroit gets their hybrid on the road (due to George Bush the Elder barfing on the Japanese prime minister, or something like that).
If your car gets less than 33 mpg, you are not a hacker, you're an end-user (unless you get less than 15 mpg, in which case you're at best a script kiddie). And let's face it, driving a gas-guzzler is unpatriotic - American soldiers don't need to die just so you can impress girls with your supercharged V8.
There's a guy on the priusmods list who has a Russian surplus light-gathering snooperscope wired into his LCD, and he can drive almost silently with the lights out at night, only tire noise and the quiet singing of the inverters can be heard. THAT'S *real* *hacking*.
And yes, there is an active prius hacker community that has already cracked part of the communication protocol - despite Toyota's inability to help us (Toyota bought the AVC LAN technology from Hitachi, unfortunately under a non-disclosure agreement they now regret).
--Charlie
. . . sweet jesus I hate hearing this argument over and over and over. Hot rodders are hor rodders and hackers. I've had V8's I've had 4 bangers. They can both be made to move quickly. Period. They can both be made to handle (even old live axles cars). What do I drive now, a Honda, why because it's fun to play with high tech goodies and it's fun to have and econo looking car that that is normally aspirated and puts 232 HP to the wheels. Can I beat V8's, yes some, can I be beaten by V8 american muschle most certainly. But for mit was the challange of build a 2 liter motor that put more that 200 to the wheels on my own. I did it and I'm happy. Have I surprised a few people yes, have I been surprised most certainly. Are some 'rice' cars just rediculous, yes, are some muscle cars yes. As far as car hacking goes, just have fun and stop crying. Oh and getting back to the article, cheap engine management that is plug and play is here. $1200 might not be cheap to some but just 5+ years ago it was unheard of.
My brother is a mechanic for one of the top diesel engine manufacturers.
He tells me that there are a number of performance tweaks on modern OTR (Over-the-Road) diesel engines which can be done through a laptop interface. That is, it's already implemented from the factory, all you have to do is adjust some parameters.
However, should a customer want something tweaked, they pay several thousand dollars (i.e., more HP). Sure, it only takes 15 minutes for my bro to tweak it, but the $$$ is to pay for the increased rate of failure-under-warranty. Occasionally, he'll do the tweak but not charge for it if the engine is out of warranty.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
The World Trade Center towers fell to avenge over one million Iraqi children starved to death by US sanctions.
US Ambassador April Glaspie specifically told Saddam Hussein the US would not interfere in inter-Arab conflicts even if Iraq invaded Kuwait.
These are facts that are not dependant on interpretation. All the facist howling trolls in the world can't change them.
When you waste oil products, you are subsidizing deceit, cruelty, terrorism, bad politics, starvation of innocents, and the death of US soldiers.
Think about it. Stop jerking that knee. Think about it. Do the research, you have Internet skills, THINK!
/.
Clearly, you have never encountered a Mercedes UniMog, which can dominate a tractor pull with its 75hp engine. Mogs can pull a 16-ton trailer... it's all about the gearing you know (and German metallurgy - you can keep your crappy Detroit steel).
Oh, and I'm talking about the REAL UniMog, not the fake mog-inspired SUV that just went on the market under the same name.
--Charlie
Plus, the blood of uncounted thousands of Arabs, and all those people in NYC that went down in the WTC!
Nice, but a touch excessive.
This is getting way OT so please feel free to ignore this, but my perception is that the VAG W12 engine, W8 Passat, Touareg, Phaeton, W12 Coupe, Bugatti Veyron and maybe even Bentley are a very unsubtle attempt by Ferdinand Pietch (VW Boss, sp?) to make his mark on history. Thing is, he's retiring pretty soon, and suddenly this large crop of odd but very impressive vehicles all turn up at once... Example of how unsubtle - the Veyron is currently being specified with a quad-turbo W18 8.4l (IIRC) engine outputting 987 BHP IIRC, with a projected top speed of over 250MPH - to do which you'd have to call VW to book an engineer who'd check the thing was safe, fir custom tyres and remove the limiter. You'd do your high speed run, he'd swap the tyres back and put the limiter on.
Ferdinand Pietch has my respect as an engineer regardless. He was responsible for the truly awesome Porsche 917 and nothing takes that away. But, as a boss, no. This worries me and just looks, well, silly. Strong rumour at the moment is that Berndt Piesetsrieder (ex-BMW boss, currently boss of Seat who VW own and getting promoted when FP leaves. Oh, I've almost certainly spelt that wrongly...) will gently run down the Phaeton, ignore the W12 and leave it about as relevant to VW as the Mercedes C1-11, and only build as many Veyrons as he has deposits for then quietly shut up about Bugatti.
The other thing I have to wonder about is ROI in engineering terms. Thing is, Audi have been experimenting with W format engines for years. Memory says the gorgeous Avus concept had a 3 bank W12. Memory also says that all the W engines spent massively long under development because getting inlet, exhaust and cooling working properly is a nightmare. Not convinced they wouldn't have been better pouring the energy into something more conventional, personally...
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is the increased convergence happening in cars. It used to be that the car manufacturers would create a chassis, add a wiper assembly, add an engine, add a door, a door lock, a transmission, ad nauseum. Each would be a more-or-less separate system, and no system would share information with another system. I'm starting to see much of this change. We have cars now that turn on the rear wiper when the wipers are on and the car is in reverse. We have cars that lock the doors when a certain speed is exceeded. Power windows detect the closing and opening of the door and adjust to allow easier closing and a better seal. Some cars can tell whose key is in the ignition, and adjust the seat to accomidate the current driver. It's only a matter of time before the same system also manages radio presets and adaptive transmission shift profiles. When this sort of environment becomes more common in cars, there will be much more hacking to be done. :)
The vehicle speed sensor (VSS) isn't there just for fun -- it's provides the transmission a critical chunk of data which it uses to decide which is the appropriate gear.
Think, McFly... think!
Civic HB burning a Viper
heres the video the dude above was talking about
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[insert funny
there's no way in hell a Civic would get 11s just from just NOS, better gearing and forced air. I'm a "ricer", and even I know it can't be done. Low 14s/high 13s? Maybe, with LOTS of NOS, but 11s? Now, maybe add a turbo and gut the car...
Also, your "37 mpg" is way off. By the time they're done adding turbos and gearing you'd be lucky if you're getting 20 mpg. Sorry, you can't magically pull all that power out of thin air, has to come from the fuel, and remember that turbo needs high octane too.
Remember that Civics start as 16-17 second cars, you can't just jump down to 11s with a healthy shot of NOS and better gearing
HybridZ.org and JagsThatRun.com (.org?) Sorry, not sure how to make links. Am well aware of theDIY-EFI folks but they seem to concentrate on eithe rmaking their own box or using older OEM GM stuff - bleah. I like the later FLASH programmable LT1 and LS1 stuff better but it's still got some gotchas including cost if you don't get it with a motor....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org