sounds familiar. I work as an ASE mechanic in a small chain of shops in the midwest. We had a deal with a company that provides code readers for long haul tru

sounds familiar. I work as an ASE mechanic in a small chain of shops in the midwest. We had a deal with a company that provides code readers for long haul trucks. mostly its just to license their expensive software as the readers themselves are off the shelf. we still have to buy pricy laptops to run them on windows 10. Recently I found out we could read codes using a raspberry pi and an adapter. I rigged up a cool little doctors cart with a monitor, a small keyboard, and the pi. I spent a few nights writing a simple python program that takes codes that are output from the reader and compares them against a database I laboriously typed up for techs to read. This went all the way to the owner of the company before I found out, but the owner loved it. Later on, after we started culling our software licenses and stopped buying hardware from the vendor, they demanded an audit. The final verdict? we owed then just short of half a million in back licenses and damages for "copying" their patent on reading OBD type codes from an engine computer. Our formal response to their threat of a lawsuit was something along the lines of "try it." I was pretty terrified the whole legal thing was happening, but the owner himself came down to my shop, promoted me to a shop captain, and personally told me to keep making the little readers if people wanted them. We never did hear back from our old software vendor, but every time someone rolls over a pi accidentally or drops one out of an engine bay, I wonder what theyre up to.