Hack Your Ignition (Before Someone Else Does) 439
guanxi writes: "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article about hacking and specifically, the "hacker's nirvana on wheels", all the way from hot-rodding to reprogramming your digital ignition. Of course, I neither endorse nor recommend any of the procedures mentioned, any of which may be inherently dangerous to your life and your warranty. "
car mods (Score:5, Informative)
The GM LTx cars are already capable of this (Score:2, Informative)
LT1 Edit [lt1.net]
That's been going on for a while (Score:3, Informative)
Wanna see a REALLY cool car? (Score:4, Informative)
Formula 1 (Score:3, Informative)
Very common already (Score:4, Informative)
For the more advanced racer, there are entire standalong engine management systems that entirely the engine computer itself (think Haltech E6k and others).
The point here is that the signals used between sensors and microprocessors onboard a vehicle aren't difficult to decode. Most relate to measuring the resistance across a sensor or sending out a pulse to run a fuel injector at a given interval. Granted, the signals sent between the various computers are a bit more complex, but it's by no means impossible to decode. The only reason that 3rd-party aftermarket manufacturers are really the only people building these things is that there isn't a whole lot of return for the average home-mechanic. By the time Joe Six-Pack builds his engine management system, he's spent so much time that he could have enhanced the performance of his vehicle with all sorts of non-electronic devices that are cheaper and better understood in the automotive community.
Are there very cool things that can be done by the individual with a personally-designed engine (and transmission, and A/C, etc) management system? Sure! Loads of cool stuff!
Now how many people out there can spare the time, effort, and money to have a system that really only performs marginally better than anything that can be bought off the shelf? Not many people, that's for sure.
But luckily, that's what universities are for...which explains why I'm still in school.
Re:Wanna see a REALLY cool car? (Score:3, Informative)
No pity for him here though. Goes along with what I think of people with toys like expensive pimped-out cars and gaudy flash sites. Give me my '87 Nissan and plain text web page any day!
Back to adding neon lights into my computer...
Nothing like having a computer controlled car (Score:2, Informative)
People have also hacked my instrument cluster computer to display a radar detector and boost gauge [tripcomp.com].
It only gets more fun from here
Re:Digital Odometers (Score:3, Informative)
I personally think that digital odometers were a mistake, but I also think that once you get past the 150k mile mark, mileage is pretty irrelavant, since most of the car has been replaced with newer parts at that point. My old car was in better shape at 140k miles than at 118k. Ive gone through numerous body panels, a radiator, a cylinder head, a few sets of tires, shocks, brakes etc etc. I think I would rather have a rebuilt car with 200k on the clock than an original parts car with 115k.
Re:That's been going on for a while (Score:1, Informative)
Retarding or advancing ignition (on distributer equipped cars) is only turning the distributer (not just the cap) forward or back. that's it.
MSD on the other hand are MultiSparkDevices. As the name implies, They spark (and hot) many times per ignition stroke. they also fire longer and have programmable rev limiters built in (as the engine can actually find the redline at will
This digital ignition stuff? It's a feeble attempt at hack proofing something that has always been hackable (timing, and fuel)
Just an old hotrodder (and
LINK UPDATE REQUESTED: (Score:4, Informative)
Use this: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hack
software mods aren't risk free (Score:3, Informative)
As for turbo chips...bear with me here. My car('91 Audi 200 quattro 20v turbo) makes 217hp stock. With new ROM chips for fuel/timing maps and a new pressure sensor supplied by an Audi tuner who has been in business since the early 80's...it makes almost 280, by allowing higher pressure from the turbo(aka "boost".) It yields sub 6 second 0-60 times for a full size luxury sedan(not to brag, but few cars, new or old, can beat me off the line, including any of Audi's current model lineup, unmodified.)
This particular chip pretty much stresses the limit of the k26 turbo; as with any turbo, spin it too fast and it'll disintegrate. These things operate at -very- high speeds...50,000 rpms is not uncommon...very high temps(several hundred degrees or more)...and very close tolerances. If a piece flies off or something, it can cause an enormous amount of damage; little pieces of the turbo can end up getting inhaled by the engine. If you're lucky, it doesn't take the engine with it. If you're not so lucky, the metal shards scratch the cylinder walls, or the oil causes so much crap to build up inside the cylinder that the compression ratio skyrockets and the engine starts to "knock"(ie when the mixture ignites before it should.) When the piston's still going up and the mixture ignites, you can break things. FAST. Look on almost all engines these days and you'll see a small sensor bolted to the block...it's a microphone, basically, and it listens for knocking(the ECU knows when it fired a spark plug, so if it gets a noise when it hasn't...tada, knocking.)
Particularly with a chip, there are a lot of things that can push the turbo over the edge...for example, a clogged air filter will make the turbo work harder to pressurize the same amount of air(ie, it'll need to spin faster.) While the engine control unit(ECU) takes into account high elevation via an external barometric sensor, it can't tell if your air filter is clogged! Another danger is that the intake air temperature can be too high; as you compress air, it heats up, and if it's too hot, the further compression in the cylinder will heat it beyond the flash point of the gas/air mixture, and you get knocking(see above.) You can also exceed the limits of the mechanical strength of the connecting rods(ie what connects the piston to the crankshaft, transferring the force of the explosion into mechanical rotation), the head bolts(what holds the "head" of the engine up against the block; it forms the top of the cylinder, and the more powerful the explosion in the cylinder, the more stress on the head bolts), the transmission, even the driveshafts sometimes
Some early chip designs for A4/S4 models pushed the turbos just a tad too much(the vendor in question had a bad reputation in the first place) and turbos were getting overspun left+right(expensive, considering the S4 has -two- turbos.)
Audi of America got wise to it, and unfortunately, is now -extremely- aggressive about going after owners who have installed aftermarket chips, despite the fact that they're quite safe now that more reputable tuners(who do better QA testing) have forced the crappy chips off the market.
So, dealers started checking ECUs for signs of removal, modification, etc. Owners countered by buying spare ECUs and installing the unmodified ECUs back into the car before having it serviced.
Amusingly, AoA caught on to this too...because their Client Relations staff were reading the webboards these guys belonged to. They were dumb enough to brag about it after "fooling the dealer".
VW and Audi have already started introducing encryption+verification that keys the ECU to all sorts of other things in the car so that it can't be easily swapped. VW/Audi's "real" reason is that it is for antitheft reasons.
It took all but a month or two for someone to figure out how to get around the keying. Same debate as publishing security exploits...except that cars generally don't get stolen unless they can be stolen in a few minutes, and keying the ECU doesn't prevent theft(it just makes the ECU useless in any other car until its been re-keyed.)
Re:car mods (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, this car hacking stuff is old hat. (Score:5, Informative)
To make an example, the average honda civic computer settings are pretty much already maxxed out in stock form. You add an intake and an exhaust and youre still in the range that the stock computer can adjust for. You can actually add about half an atmosphere of boost (from turbo or supercharger) and still not need a custom computer. This applies to a most other non-turbo cars as well. Factory turbo cars have even higher limits.
Remember, modern cars have to be able to operate at 10,000 feet above and below sea level in a wide range of temperatures. Most cars have injectors that can take about 150% to 200% of stock duty before they begin to max out. Up to this point the car will still not even pollute!
Basically the only 2 ways to outpace the stock computer is to
1)bring in too little air at idle or have massively oversized injectors (the computer can't control the injectors to produce less than a certain minimum period of being open) which will cause "lopey idle" or stalling and rich emmissions.
2)bring in so much air at high rpm that the stock injectors can't let in enough fuel. Basically you will start to run "lean" (not enough fuel) which will produce very high temperatures and detonation (and kill your engine).
You basically only need a special computer if you are running massive cams (alternatively you could just raise the idle, which most people do) or if youre running such massive amounts of boost that the only solution is to run massive injectors (here again, you can actually just raise the idle). Now consider this: when youre making over double the stock hp, there is no way a factory computer is going to be able to cope anyway- I dont see the point of making them more hackable. On top of which, the only reason to use an expensive computer is to make the car more emissions friendly. And guess what mods are pretty much illegal under CARB rules? You guessed it! Programmable ECUs!!! The high-boost 323 and miata guys routinely run hacked ECUs with 12-15psi of boost, then turn down the boost and swap injectors for smog every two years. Its pretty sad that you have to break the law to pollute less.
Vehicle Speed Sensor and Speedometer Cables (Score:3, Informative)
This meant no headlights, turn signals, radios, and no guages. Nothing. Which meant that the odometer didn't rack up miles. Perfect if you plan on selling the thing.
Heheh...
I imagine though that it would probably be just as easy to disconnect the cable in a normal odometer if you wanted to deceive. I'm not positive though.Older cars had a speedometer cable coming from the transmission tailshaft or transaxle to the gauge. The cable was merely a concentric cable in jacket, kinda like bicycle brake cable but meant to spin. For the most part, you could simply reach up behind the dashboard, feel around to the center of the back of the speedometer, and unclip the speedo cable from the gauge. A warning: this is a lot more difficult than it sounds, the contortions required to get your hand back there are nasty, there are probably live wires with some current (ie. headlight circuit, ammeter, etc) back there so make sure you take off any metallic jewelry, and stuff back there is fragile and expensive (big labor) to fix.
Don't disconnect the speedo cable at the transmission. The cable is usually driven directly by a gear, and it's kept lubricated inside the transmission oil. When you take off the cable, if you don't plug the hole in the transmission well, dust will get in there and lunch your transmission (to say nothing of the big leak messing up your driveway).
Because speedometer cables are expensive and heavy and the fuel injection system likes to know the car's speed so that it can better understand the engine load, most cars since about 1985 will have a Vehicle Speed Sensor. The VSS is attached to the side of the transmission exactly where the speedo cable would have come out. It uses optical sensors, hall effect sensors or magnetic pickup coils to create a pulsetrain relative to the speed of the car. The pulsetrain is then sent to the computer, the computer usually sends that on to the speedometer. Sometimes they're simply paralleled.
You could disconnect the VSS just by unplugging the wire. Most cars won't even notice it until there's an engine load (vacuum is lowered, throttle position and engine speed aren't idle) which could only be explained by movement. At that point, your Check Engine light will light up, and it probably won't go away until you reconnect the sensor. Sometimes it won't go out until you visit the dealership. And, unless the EFI computer reads the data coming from the ABS computer as a backup to the VSS, it's very unlikely that it will generate a signal to drive the speedo or the tach - though, based on engine speed and knowing what gear you're in, the computer could calculate and drive the speedo/odo to display accurate speed and mileage.
My best advice is, if you want to play with the EFI system (and VSS/Speedo/Odo as a consequence), find yourself an earlier (mid-80s) fuel-injected car on the way to the junkyard. Chevy Celebrity / Pontiac 6000 are common, cheap (about $200 if you find one with expired plates rusting in someone's laneway), durable and relatively easy to fix. The GM multiport and throttle body EFI systems are well documented all over the place because they're so popular, and variants were used across the entire product line in a given year.
Buy the car, take it home, start it up, and start pulling sensors to see what they all do!
Re:car mods (Score:4, Informative)
GM hacks have been available for a while (Score:2, Informative)
Modern GM cars come with what is called a memcal. This plugs into the ECM, and it contains the PROM, some filter networks for the knock sensor, and some basic circuitry to run in 'limp home mode' if the PROM fails.
There are people retrofitting these systems to every possible configuration, the most popular is the Buick Grand National/SyTy/Turbo Sunbird ECM because it supports boost conditions, or the 90-92 Firebird ECM because they are so easy to find.
There is even an open source tuner program for Firebirds and Camaros to watch the ALDL datastream and see everything that is going on inside your engine.
It's a real hacker culture, and I enjoy reading all the discussions that go on.