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Hack Your Ride

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the practical-hacklications dept.

LukePieStalker writes "Monday's Boston Globe has a story on the global market for car chippers. The article describes a global subculture of "drivers who reprogram their vehicles and the companies that keep them supplied with high-performance software and silicon chips". One nice hack: a car chipped-up for the race track can be set back to factory specs for the street simply by pushing the cruise control button."

4 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. So, how long before by WormholeFiend · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How long before we can wi-fi-cluster cars, and let the network arrange speed and routing through congested urban areas?

    I want the future now!

  2. DSM by Enigma_Man · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm currently involved in writing assembly for my car's ECU. It's a 92 DSM Turbo AWD. The difficult thing is it's a proprietary OEM variant of a Motorola HC11, with lots of unknown opcodes, but there's a good movement to try and figure them all out. Right now, I've written a stutterbox, and other people have figured out where all of the timing, and fuel maps are, and where the variables for injector sizes are. It's pretty great. Writing assembly is fun, and ha>0ring my car is even more fun :) -Jesse

    --
    Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
  3. Re:"Chips" by pll178 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hondata (http://www.hondata.com) has been doing this for years on Hondas/Acuras. Ever since Honda started using flashable ECUs in the most recent generation of cars, reprogramming Honda ECUs is a piece of cake. Just connect an OBDII cable to your programmer, press a button and your ECU is reflashed. One caveat is that Hondata spent a year or two decoding the fuel map codes. Unfortunately, they have to decode each model's ECU, but from what I understand, they are fairly similar (plus they have years of experience in hacking ECUs).

  4. Re:That bowling ball! It's my wife by Tackhead · · Score: 4, Interesting
    > He started out just fixing his own...then friends of his with Ferraris would ask him to tinker with theirs...one thing lead to another.

    Ironic. My first "electronics" project as a child was abusing my dad's 4-track reel-to-reel tape recorder by opening it up twisting the belt around to force it to run backwards. I recorded the "strange foreign language" in J. Geils' No Anchovies Please, unhacked the tape recorder, and played the message backwards to discover the shocking secret:

    "It doesn't take a genuis to tell the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad."

    I've waited most of my life to use that line in context. I am complete! w00t!