Collaborate Disseminate
A “Check Engine” light on your dashboard could mean anything from a loose gas cap to a wallet-destroying repair in the offing. For [Dean Segovis], his CEL was indicating a …read more Continue reading Replace Your Automatic Transmission With a Bunch of Relays
A few years ago, Toyota was in the news for a major safety issue with a number of their passenger vehicles. Seemingly at random, certain cars were accelerating without concern …read more Continue reading Recreating the “Stuck Throttle” Problem on a Toyota
When [Robot Cantina] isn’t busy tweaking the 420cc Big Block engine in their Honda Insight, they’re probably working on some other completely far out automotive atrocity. In the video below the …read more Continue reading Saving Fuel With Advanced Sensors And An Arduino
The inlet and exhaust valve timing of a piston engine plays a large role in engine performance. Many modern automotive engines have some sort of variable valve timing, but the valves are still mechanically coupled together and to the crankshaft. This means that there is always a degree of performance …read more
Continue reading Hypercar Valve Technology On A Harbour Freight Engine
Classic motorcycles are the wild west of information displays. Often lacking even basic instrumentation such as a fuel gauge and sometimes even a speedometer, motorcycles have come a long way in instrument cluster design from even 20 years ago. There’s still some room for improvement, though, and luckily a lot …read more
Continue reading A Motorcycle Dashboard Straight from the ECU
The modern internal combustion engine is an engineering marvel. We’re light-years ahead of simple big blocks and carburetors, and now there are very fast, very capable computers sensing adjusting the spark timing, monitoring the throttle position, and providing a specific amount of power to the wheels at any one time. For the last few years [Josh] has been building a fully-featured engine management system, and now he’s entered it in the Hackaday Prize.
The Speeduino project is, as the name would suggest, built around the Arduino platform. In this case, an Arduino Mega. The number of pins and PWMs is …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: Engine Control Units and Arduinos
As ever, I am fighting a marginally winning battle against my 1991 Mazda MX-5, and this is the story of how I came to install a wideband oxygen sensor in my Japanese thoroughbred. It came about as part of my ongoing project to build myself a viable racecar, and to figure out why my 1990s Japanese economy car engine runs more like a late 1970s Malaise-era boat anchor.
I’ve always considered myself unlucky. My taste for early 90s metal has meant I’ve never known the loving embrace of OBD-2 diagnostics, and I’ve had to make to do with whatever hokey …read more
If you are working with OBD2 hardware or software, it’s easy enough to access test data, simply plug into a motor vehicle with an OBD2 socket. If, however, you wish to test OBD2 software under all possible fault conditions likely to be experienced by an engine, you are faced with a problem in that it becomes difficult to simulate all faults on a running engine without breaking it. This led [Fixkick] to create an OBD2 simulator using a secondhand Ford ECU supplied with fake sensor data from an Arduino to persuade it that a real engine was connected.
The write-up …read more
[Charlie Miller] and [Chris Valasek] Have just released all their research including (but not limited to) how they hacked a Jeep Cherokee after the newest firmware updates which were rolled out in response to their Hacking of a Cherokee in 2015.
FCA, the Corp that owns Jeep had to recall 1.5 million Cherokee’s to deal with the 2015 hack, issuing them all a patch. However the patch wasn’t all that great it actually gave [Charlie] and [Chris] even more control of the car than they had in the first place once exploited. The papers they have released are a goldmine …read more
Continue reading Car Security Experts Dump All Their Research and Vulnerabilities Online
Back in the mid 1980’s I worked at a company called Commodore Business Machines, a company that made home computers where our annual Superbowl was the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the first week in January.
Some time in November a Datsun Z would get parked in the front lot and then not move until whatever snow mounds that got plowed over it melted sometime in early spring. Ultimately I would have it towed leaving behind a sad little pile of rust and nuts and bolts. With a bonus check in hand for finishing …read more
