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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. "
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.
Nothing to hack? Hah!
It starts with the baseball cards taped to the frame that make the BRRRRRRR sound in the spokes.
Next thing you know you've got an oxy-acetalyne torch in your hand and you're welding a sissy bar to the frame and extending the front forks for that low-rent low-rider look.
Ask the people at Fat City or Rivendell how they got started.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
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."
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
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....
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.
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
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 car manufacturers have another very good reason for keeping the electonics systems relatively simple- so they WORK BETTER. Each flaw costs them millions of dollars in recalls or warrantied repairs. The less extraneous shit they cram into the electronics, the less is likely to go wrong.
;-)
Maybe commerical software engineers will realize this, some day?
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Now if I can just hack my car to start somewhere in the first 200 tries...
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
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.