ODBC is a standard; this is bad for them. I have a working version of a simulator on the bench. it’s not hardware as of yet as i’ve replaced the factory firmware in a PCM with my own.

I’ll skip all that and just tell you the sneaky stuff about the device.

People think wow it’s got a sim in it; yes it does the sim is used to provide a unique identifier on a private circuit. These are setup very much like vpn’s on the providers network. Ie it’s not really a cellphone; you can’t get a voip circuit out of it.

Pulling the device out of the port to drag race and plugging it back in is bad.. It’s got circuit for that and has the ability to keep itself powered via a cap on the layer 2 board for awhile.

ODBC is an always on deal in many cars ie; power exist switched or not with ignition. But not all.

ODBC is also a datastream it’s not something you need to request a value from the pcm on it’s very serial in nature and you decide what you want to listen to.. This is bad as they have access to everything and makes it very hard to figure out what they are looking at.

Ie some bmw’s have gloading in the stream; companies may add anything they want to it. What makes it a standard are a base set of headers generic devices can expect to exist.

I think the best way is daughter card between it and the device that will range out the values.

Ie pcm might see a speed of 12 24 50 ; we can easily curve those to bring back 15 20 25 indicating to the device a smooth acceleration curve.

The big thing remains the accelometers on the device itself; it’s going to require a hack to null those. Problem is the chip is fairly decent and we would only want to null values out of spec for what we are trying to hide at the same time it could use speed as a key part of x to decide that. bummer.

Once you add the ability for them to detect your location via cellphone towers it really starts to tilt into a fairly decent hack. Pushing fake data down the device is kinda mute at that point we have zero way to fake the location of the device itself. It can easily monitor if a vehicle was moving at a certain time and even get an avrg speed out of it although they could never use that calculated speed to do anything it would be iffy at best.

From a tablet please excuse generic bad stuff that comes from typing on one of these crappy devices.

The usb port uses hid protocol and dumps logged data in ASCII format. The manual notes that tne unit may cause problems on certain vehicles.

The Davis Instruments website list several models, including at least one with wireless download ability. I suspect the wireless is bluetooth to allow fleet Maintenence shops to read the data with a tablet or smartphone app.
I doubt that the insurance company would use the more expensive wireless units

Tell me again how you don’t think the chip could really catalog all that data. It is ripe for the picking with the proper setup

Its another WASTE OF RESOURCE ¬! yes take your old mobile screens . yes pull up old chips from the 70′s to use in your own projects because of this little gimiickry is ofsetting you trying to do anything about it.

Sry , its little wank-apps and i-pad users in this world that get me steaming with the waste of crunch/CPU and or dare be-it efficiency. bullshit architecture I could design as a learning ASIC ..fumem fume fume .. have a good’n

Happy Bacons!

To put it simple your cars computer spits out a good deal of information. but some things people mentioned aren’t sent

ECU doesn’t know its vin, doesn’t know the time of day, and it in most cases has no idea if you are putting your foot on the brake (possible in automatics).

(Newer cars know the vin. This thing uses cell towers to transmit so the time and date will be known also. Nearly all cars made in the last 10 years know when the brake is pressed (Auto or Manual. It doesn’t matter).)

The information the insurance company will be after will most likely be the rappid acceleration and miles driven,

both can easily be falsified. USB readers for OBDII are roughly 20 dollars on ebay, a small board can also be created to forward false codes and information into the progressive chip

(See post by John S. Swygert)

if you have a carputer installed in your vehicle you can set the cap for RPM and MPH, this can easily fool the insurance company to think you’ve driven less and been more calm in your driving patterns.

(This would also mess up your shift points, abs, trac control, odometer etc)

The hacking, unless the OBDII and Carputer are already installed would cost far more than you would save insurance wise to validate the reason

just my 2 cents

(I agree)

This is why if I had OnStar, I would disable it–just cut power to the transmitter. There’s always a wire to cut! Also John, that’s why I disabled the webcam on my laptop. Now I can’t figure out how to turn it back on, but at least I’ve got peace of mind!