Cars for Tinkerers?

Lots of interesting things on the automotive front. First off, jotap starts us off with this question: "The 'smart' with its auto/semi-auto sequential gearbox, traction control, electronic managed turbo engine, electronic accelerator and clutch control, G force sensors, and more. Some companies sell chips to upgrade the engine power and change the (slow) original gear shifting timings. It would be nice to have a custom control panel on board and change the settings with a click. I think there's no other car with a better price/technology/size ratio then the 'smart', or is there?" The more modifiable they are, the better! While we are on the subject, let me relate some of the other interesting car news that happened to be lying in the bin. io333 notes: "These direct quotes from this CNN article are self explanatory:

'Since 1996, all new cars sold in the United States have been required to have an emissions-control system called OBD-II...'

'...One company, Davis Instruments, has a new device that probes and records what our OBD systems see, and is trying to find a broad market for it....'

'...Called the CarChip, the product is a small recording plug (about the size of a 9-volt battery) that you attach to your car's OBD-II port, which is usually hidden under the dash but easily reachable from the driver's seat. Once installed, the plug records and time-stamps a selection of OBD data (speed, braking events, coolant temperature, and several other, more technical data points) every five seconds. When you remove the CarChip and plug it into your PC, you can download the information and see graphs of what your car's been doing.'

There are two versions and they really don't cost very much. Unfortunately my car is one of the few listed that this won't work with, but I thought some of you might find it useful." ThatTallGuy sent in the Business 2.0 version of the story, which you can read here.

You may not know it, but there's an interesting relationship between VisiCalc and cars! index72 explains: "Ever wonder what happened to Bob Frankston, the inventor of VisiCalc? Ever the computer pioneer, he proposes the creation of a generic programming interface for automobile data displays."

So it sounds like car enthusiasts and tinkerers might be in for some interesting times in the upcoming months. If you guys do manage to come up with something cool, please do share some pictures?

Comments

The Ultimate Car For Tinkerers

[the eric conspiracy]

Caterham Super Seven. Available in KIT form. The Superlight R500 version has the highest power/weight ratio of any street car and is the fastest 0-100-0 MPH (11.44 secs) road car in the world.

The Classic version is the car driven by Patrick McGoohan in the opening sequence of the TV series "The Prisoner"

In production for 40 years and kicking every day.

http://www.caterham.co.uk/news/index.htm

Re:Not Any Time Soon

[Jonny 290]

Yet there is no standard stereo.

Is there a standard hard drive?

There is a standard SIZE (I think) but I can't just pull mine out and slide a new one in.

Yes, there is a standard DIN chassis size, and your car is a fucking moving vehicle that can at times reach speeds of 100 mph. Do you want your radio to just 'slide in and out', possibly decapitating you or smashing your chest in when you get into a headon wreck at 140mph combined speed? Cars are built a little bit more robustly than computers, and yes, screws and bolts are always needed.

I'd have to take off my dash (I assume) and get to a ton of screws. (I have a 2k Honda Oddessey).

You're perfectly right. Of course, swapping a stereo isn't supposed to be a ten-minute pull swap. It shouldn't take more than a half hour to completely take off all parts needed, and if it takes one longer than that, they shouldn't be trying to install their car stereo.

I found this out while trying to find out how to plug something into my car stereo. I wanted to plug in my iPod through a standard dual RCA stereo cable, but I can't do that without buying an aftermarket stereo.

Yeah, and I want a Firewire port for my ECU - but 99 percent of other car driver's don't. (well, maybe more people want it with my car than with average joe car)

wanting to have any controll over the chips in your car easily is a LOT to ask.


It's not a safety thing. It's an auto shop conspiracy thing. You think the car dealers WANT tuners to be able to plug in a serial cable and reprogram their fuel maps? Hell no!

A company like reprograms ECU's for turbo usage, adjusted fuel maps, improved injector capacity, etc. You'd be shocked at how crippled Japanese imports are compared to domestics.

Re:Not Any Time Soon

[MBCook]

Is there a standard hard drive?

Yes, there is. There isn't a standard capacity, but the interface is standard (IDE) and the form factor is too (3.5" drive slot)

You're perfectly right. Of course, swapping a stereo isn't supposed to be a ten-minute pull swap. It shouldn't take more than a half hour to completely take off all parts needed, and if it takes one longer than that, they shouldn't be trying to install their car stereo.

I agree that it shouldn't take 30 seconds. But I should be able to do it easily. It should at least say how to do it in the owners manual. As far as I can tell, instructions aren't published anywhere.

Yeah, and I want a Firewire port for my ECU - but 99 percent of other car driver's don't. (well, maybe more people want it with my car than with average joe car)

I think alot of people would like the ability to simply plug something into their car stereo using a standard earphone jack. I'm just saying that there should be standards for how you extend a stereo (the tape/cd changer/minidisc drive interface).

It's not a safety thing. It's an auto shop conspiracy thing. You think the car dealers WANT tuners to be able to plug in a serial cable and reprogram their fuel maps? Hell no!

Must everything be a conspiracy?

Re:Open standards in car electronics ?

[zero_offset]

OBD, OBDII and the been-proposed-forever OBDIII are more concerned with defining [b]what[/b] to measure and record, versus [b]how[/b] to do it. There are still proprietary interfaces and codes, and the underlying implementation differs wildly from one car to another (even within a single manufacturer). Some things have been reasonably consolidated (for example, there are only a couple of different connector types) but it's far from standardized.

Incidentally, OBDIII is something to fear. They've proposed things like remote-kill capability. I don't trust cops that much...

Monitoring is easy, tuning is difficult

[Matt_Bennett]

While you can monitor your car pretty easy with devices to read things like the OBD, but actually changing how it works is pretty difficult. The car companies have some obligation to the EPA (in terms of making sure their cars are (somewhat) clean, and keeping them that way, by making it difficult for the average joe to twiddle with his ECU like he used to be able to twiddle his carbeurator. From the factories, cars are tuned for the optimum performance/emissions that satisfy the EPA and the marketers, virtually anything you do to improve performance will make emissions worse.

Some carmakers have gone to the extreme to make it difficult to change the ECU maps- Ford's (now obsolete) EEC-IV used a special version of the Intel 8051 (the 8061) and EEPROM that Intel (and their 2nd sources) were *only* authorized to sell to Ford. There were some modifications that could be done to improve performance, but those were a kludge that used a diagnostic port. [I worked as a co-op for Ford in the late 80's]

If you really do want to tinker with your car's engine, look to cars with engines that have been around a very long time- such as the Chevy 350, people have been tuning and playing with the 350 for decades, even as it has gone from carbs to EFI. There is a huge installed base and tinkerers are everywhere.

Hondata

[vikstar]

If you've got a Honda, here's the place to visit for tinkering: www.hondata.com.

Real Car Hackers do it this way:

[osjedi]

Come on guys! Think outside the box. Is your car's computer proprietary? Doesn't provide all the outputs you want? So ditch it and build/buy one that does. It only cost me $600 to convert my car to a user-programable digital ECU that controls all aspects of the fuel injection and ignition timing. From the cockpit I can do live tuning, data logging, live monitoring of injector pulse width, ignition timing angle, manifold pressure, coolant temperature, intake air temperature, exhaust oxygen content, rpm, and throttle angle. And that's just the begining. You can extrapolate and display/datalog your fuel consumption rate (useing injector pulse width, rpm, injector flow rate, and fuel pressure. Some other guys are working on adding gear selection monitoring also. By monitoring gear selected and knowing the gear ratios, weight of the car, and monitoring ECU output of rpm change over time you can do real-time extrapolation and display of torque/horsepower. Put that on your dashboard LCD and smoke it.

You don't need a brand-new high-tech car to do this stuff. I race a 30yr-old Porsche 914 in SCCA solo events. I also drive it to work on a daily basis. Converting to the digital ECU (from a dying 30yr-old analog system) I picked up about 10hp (before/after dynomometer runs) AND an additional 7mpg! See, you CAN have your cake and eat it too. :) The other nice thing about programable ECU's is that they can be moved from one engine to another (4, 6, 8 cyl. rotary, it doesn't matter) so next year I can move the ECU to the new engine I'm building this winter. ;)

Most programable ECU's have RS232 input/output so you can do all kinds of cool stuff with them - EASILY! Do a google search for PerfectPower, Autronic, SDS, Wolf 3D, Megasquirt, Haltec, Motec, Hawk EC21...