car hacks

463 Articles

Homebrew Dash Cam Enables Full Suite Of Sensors

December 6, 2016 by 21 Comments

You heard it here first: dash cams are going to be the next must-have item for your daily driver. Already reaching market saturation in some parts of the world but still fairly uncommon in North America, we predict that car makers will soon latch onto the trend and start equipping cars with dash cams as standard equipment. And you can just bet that whatever watered-down, overpriced feature set they come up with will be sure to disappoint, so you might want to think about building your own Raspberry Pi dash cam with an accelerometer and lots of LEDS.

Still very much in the prototyping phase, [CFLanger]’s project is at its heart a dash cam, but it looks like he wants to go far beyond that. Raspivid and a PI NoIR camera take care of the video streaming, but the addition of a Pi SenseHAT gives [CFLanger] a bunch of options for sensing and recording the car’s environment. Not content with the SenseHAT’s onboard accelerometer, he added an ADXL345 to the sensor suite. The 64-pixel LED display is just for fun – it displays pitch and roll of the platform – and a yet-to-be-implemented bar-graph display will show acceleration in the X-axis. He figures the whole thing is good for a couple of days of video, but we hope he adds audio capture and perhaps ECU data from an OBDII-Bluetooth adapter.

We’ve seen surprisingly few DIY dash cams on Hackaday, at least so far. There has been a dash cam teardown and retasking, and there are plenty of dashboard computer builds, though. Seems like most hackers want that DIY self-driving car first.

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Self-Driving Cars Are Not (Yet) Safe

December 5, 2016 by 123 Comments

Three things have happened in the last month that have made me think about the safety of self-driving cars a lot more. The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has issued its guidance on the safety of semi-autonomous and autonomous cars. At the same time, [Geohot]’s hacker self-driving car company bailed out of the business, citing regulatory hassles. And finally, Tesla’s Autopilot has killed its second passenger, this time in China.

At a time when [Elon Musk], [President Obama], and Google are all touting self-driving cars to be the solution to human error behind the wheel, it’s more than a little bold to be arguing the opposite case in public, but the numbers just don’t add up. Self-driving cars are probably not as safe as a good sober driver yet, but there just isn’t the required amount of data available to say this with much confidence. However, one certainly cannot say that they’re demonstrably safer.

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Sporty Cars Making Fake Engine Noise

December 5, 2016 by 125 Comments

Following the monumental emissions-cheating scandal at VW, further horrible revelations demonstrate just how corrupt the modern automotive industry has become: many cars make fake engine noise. And we’re not just talking about those darn sneaky Priuses.

Ford, BMWs, Porsche, and yes, Volkswagen are all doing it, to different degrees. Some of the systems, like the one in the BMW M5, play engine sounds at low volumes through the stereo system. As you’d expect from a BMW, it’s an overly-technological solution: they have built essentially a BMW engine-sound synthesizer that responds to the tachometer and gas pedal data from the car’s data bus. They also let you turn off the “acoustic experience”.

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Geohot’s Comma.ai Self-Driving Code On GitHub

December 1, 2016 by 30 Comments

First there was [Geohot]’s lofty goal to build a hacker’s version of the self-driving car. Then came comma.ai and a whole bunch of venture capital. After that, a letter from the Feds and a hasty retreat from the business end of things. The latest development? comma.ai’s openpilot project shows up on GitHub!

If you’ve got either an Acura ILX or Honda Civic 2016 Touring addition, you can start to play around with this technology on your own. Is this a good idea? Are you willing to buy some time on a closed track?

A quick browse through the code gives some clues as to what’s going on here. The board files show just how easy it is to interface with these cars’ driving controls: there’s a bunch of CAN commands and that’s it. There’s some unintentional black comedy, like a (software) crash-handler routine named crash.py.

What’s shocking is that there’s nothing shocking going on. It’s all pretty much straightforward Python with sprinklings of C. Honestly, it looks like something you could get into and start hacking away at pretty quickly. Anyone want to send us an Acura ILX for testing purposes? No promises you’ll get it back in one piece.

If you missed it, read up on our coverage of the rapid rise and faster retreat of comma.ai. But we don’t think the game is over yet: comma.ai is still hiring. Are open source self-driving cars in our future? That would be fantastic!

Via Endagadget. Thanks for the tip, [FaultyWarrior]!

Think Your Way To Work In A Mind-Controlled Tesla

November 18, 2016 by 11 Comments

When you own an $80,000 car, a normal person might be inclined to never take it out of the garage. But normal often isn’t what we do around here, so seeing a Tesla S driven by mind control is only slightly shocking.

[Casey_S] appears to be the owner of the Tesla S in question, but if he’s not he’ll have some ‘splaining to do. He took the gigantic battery and computer in a car-shaped case luxury car to a hackathon in Berkley last week and promptly fitted it with the gear needed to drive the car remotely. Yes, the Model S has steering motors built in, but Tesla hasn’t been forthcoming with an API to access such functions. So [Casey_S] and his team had to cobble together a steering servo from a windshield wiper motor and a potentiometer mounted to a frame made of 2x4s. Linear actuators attach to the brake and accelerator pedals, and everything talks to an Arduino.

The really interesting part is that the whole thing is controlled by an electroencephalography helmet and a machine learning algorithm that detects when the driver thinks “forward” or “turn right.” It translates those thoughts to variables that drive the actuators. Unfortunately, space constraints kept [Casey_S] from really putting the rig through its paces, but the video after the break shows that the system worked well enough to move the car forward and steer a little.

There haven’t been too many thought-controlled cars featured here before, but we have covered a wheelchair with an EEG interface.

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One Hundred Weeks Of Legal Car Hacking

November 10, 2016 by 33 Comments

There is a scene in the movie “Magic Mike” where the lead character — a male stripper — explains to a room of women the laws against having physical contact with a performer. Then he intones, “… but I see a lot of lawbreakers up in this house.”

We know if we could look out through the Web browser, we could say the same thing. There’s a lot of gray zone activities considered commonplace. Have you ever ripped a CD or DVD to take with your on your phone? Gray; we won’t judge. A lot of the legal issues involved are thorny (and I should point out, I’m not a lawyer, so take what I say with a grain of salt).

Do you own your car? Well, probably you and the bank, but certainly the deal you made involves the idea that you own the car. If it is paid off, you can do what you like with it, including — if you wanted to — stripping it bare for parts. Back in the day, your car was some wheels and some mechanical devices. These days, it is a computer (actually, a few computers) and some I/O devices that process gasoline into rotary motion. Computers have software. Do you own that software?

The answer has, legally, been no. However, a recent decision by the US Copyright office allows car owners to legally analyze and modify their vehicle software (with some limitations) for the next two years. After that? We’ll see.

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A Car Stand Made Of Sand

November 7, 2016 by 19 Comments

When the guys at [Practical Engineering] say they have a dirty car stand, they really mean it! They made a block of dirt and sheets of fiberglass as reinforcement material, and the resistance was put to test by using it as a car stand. And yes, the block does the job without collapsing.

An exmple of MSE
A MSE structure. The lateral walls add no strength, they just look nice.

Soil is a naturally unstable material, it relies only on friction for structural stability, but it has a very low shear strength (the resistance of the material’s internal structure to slide against itself). Therefore, as soon as you put some weight, a soil structure fails. The trick is to form a composite by adding layers of a stiff material. Those layers increase the shear strength and you end up with an incredibly strong composite, or ‘mechanically stabilized earth‘ (MSE). You probably drive by some everyday, as in the picture at the right.

Even though the modern form of MSE was due to French engineer Sir Henri Vidal, reinforced soil has been used since the beginnings of human history, in fact, some sections of the Great Wall of China were made using this technique. [Practical Engineering] explanation and demonstration video is very well made, be sure to check it after the break. In case you don’t want to play with dirt next time you need to fix your car, you can always make a 3D printed jack.