Arduino Based EATC Replacement

May 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

The Electronic Automatic Temperature Control Module on [Dan Mattox’s] 2000 Ford Taurus bit the dust. The junkyards in the area didn’t have a matching replacement and a new one is pretty hard to come by so he built an EATC replacement from an Arduino Mega. It includes a solenoid controller board for the vent selector, blower control, and new switches to control the power windows. He’s got the system up and running which is important because after removing the broken EATC the car was stuck blowing 90-degree air at full blast. He’s put together a demo and an installation video which we’ve embedded after the break but there’s also a photo album you can page through. The sketch that we developed to control the system is up at pastebin so get it while it’s hot.

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Modern Car Data Systems Lack Security

May 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 65 Comments

Tomorrow a team of researchers will present their paper on Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile (PDF) at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Much like the racing simulators we’ve seen they’re exploiting the ODB-II port to get at the vehicle’s Controller-area network, or CAN-bus. We’re not surprised at all that they can display custom text on the dashboard display or read sensor data from the car. What does surprise us is their exposé on how truly unsecured the system is. It seems that access to any device on the CAN-bus gives them unobstructed control of the car’s systems. Any device can send commands to any other device. They’ve even found a way to write malicious code to the car’s computer which can be programmed to erase itself in the event of a crash.

Much like RFID the security risks here are basically nill for the vast majority of consumers. We just find it a bit surprising that there’s apparently been little thought put into fortifying the communications between the safety systems such as the brakes on the vehicle. For instance, team experimented with sending random packets over the CAN-bus and stumbled across a way to lock the brake on just one wheel. To us it’s conceivable that a malfunctioning device on the network could start sending out damaged packets and cause a dangerous malfunction like this one.

The 14-page PDF linked above is a page-turner, check it out on your hacked ereader during lunch.

Manual Transmission Gear sensor

May 9, 2010 by Mike Szczys 57 Comments

[Ben] bought a remote starter for his car but needed a way to make sure the manual transmission was in neutral when starting. He built this infrared sensor frame to detect the position of the stick. It uses four beam paths which will tell him the exact gear or neutral position of the shifter. For this project he just needs to detect neutral but exact gearing is apparently necessary information for his next hacking project. We initially were worried about sunlight interfering with the sensor readings but he’s building this to go under the collar that is used to cover up the mechanical joint at the base of the stick.

Vehicle Information Display Hacks

May 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

We’ve had a few folks send us info about their vehicle display hacks after seeing [Will O’Brien’s] motorcycle computer a few days ago.

On the left we have a display for an electric vehicle. [S1axter] is using a 4.3″ TFT screen to display charge information for each battery cell in the car. An ATmega88 collects the data and sends it to a breakout board with an LCD controller on it.

To the right is a display from a Formula Student project. a Matrix Orbital GLK19264-7T-1U LCD display provides a lot of real estate for displaying data. Right now [Alan] is still in the early prototyping stages, but the video after the break demonstrates the RPM readout using a function generator. It’s not shown in the video, but he tells us that he’s since tried it out with the engine and has a PIC 16f877 reading temperate data from the electronic control transmission sensors in addition to the RPM data.

Correction: Thanks to [j] for correcting our mistake. This is a Formula Student car.

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Motorcycle computer

May 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

Hackaday writer of yore [Will O’Brien] has been working on this hardware for his motorcycle. Speed, voltage, gear, and temperature data is displayed on a 16×2 character LCD. The speed is pulled from the bike itself and the gear is calculated by comparing engine RPM to wheel RPM. He’s using the popular DS1820 1-wire temp sensor along with an Arduino to pull everything together. At this point he estimates there’s about $50 worth of parts, but that can be reduced by etching a board and just using the necessary components.

Forget The Rovio, Drive A Taxi With Your Mind.

April 29, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

While browsing through flicker this morning, we spotted this interesting image. Two radio controlled cars hooked to Arduinos. What was going on? What is [knolleary] doing with them? We couldn’t find any information so we clicked through to his personal site. What we found was a quite interesting story about how he set up a race between two taxi cabs being controlled by the Emotiv headsets for the BBC. Yeah, forget driving a Rovio around with your mind. We’re still a bit curious about the two bumper cars in the picture. We can see that his tests were done on a blue radio controlled mini, so what are the bumper cars for? Did any of you catch this on the air? How well did the taxis drive? Was he using the facial expressions or the concentration?

Driving The Car Without Going Anywhere

April 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAZSPK4pWc]

This video game controller is a factory fresh VW. Much like the racing simulator from earlier in the week, the video game data is being displayed on the instrument panel. This takes us to a much higher level now because control for the game is taken from the car’s CANbus using and ODB-II connector. If you don’t speak in automotive jargon, that means that the sensor readings from the steering wheel, shifter, and pedals are being picked up and exported as joystick commands to the PC running the driving game. The only place the experience uses a substitute for the real thing is the sound, which is being played through speakers instead of emanating from under the hood. Looks like you just need to add a projector and screen to your garage in order to turn it into the hottest new gaming device.