15 ms·

As an automotive mechanic, this is awesome. You have no idea how many sensors/controllers in a car can only be reset by violating the DRM. Example: the suspen

As an automotive mechanic, this is awesome. You have no idea how many sensors/controllers in a car can only be reset by violating the DRM. Example: the suspension control computer for newer fords (so far just raptor and newer commercial F series) is separate from the ECU, and if it faults out you need to buy a new $2500 computer and sensor pack. You can, however, replace a commonly blown diode or fuse on the computer but opening the case causes the device to stay "in fault/service" With a raspberry pi and a bit of python however you can reset this tamper code once the whole assembly is closed. but since it "violates the DRM" most shops generally just bill for the part and labor.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mito88 8y ago
i2c.
jedberg 8y ago
> With a raspberry pi and a bit of python however you can reset this tamper code once the whole assembly is closed. This sentence is interesting to me. It tells me that now mechanics need to learn programming skills to be successful. Software really is eating the world...
- ngngngng 8y ago
  I'm convinced most successful mechanics could be successful programmers. The skill set of looking at a problem and debugging until you really understand the architecture and design of what you're looking at is very similar in both fields.
  - dleslie 8y ago
    American McGee is probably the most famous example of this. > Dead-end jobs followed – washing dishes, polishing rings at a jewelry store, ringing orders at a record store and, finally, fixing Volkswagens at Uncle J.O.'s auto repair shop. > The tinkering that's required of mechanics appealed to the teenage hacker. The $6-an-hour job "was the first time I ever felt like I accomplished something at work," McGee said. > On breaks, covered in grease, he'd write inventory and customer tracking applications for the shop. https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-great-american-mcgee-game/ https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-great-american-mcgee-game/
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      A lot of software engineers around me love poking in their cars
      - astrange 8y ago
        Are they not afraid of regressions?
        p2t2p 8y ago
        With car it much easier to provide a decent test coverage though :)
      - berbec 8y ago
        My nerdiest friend and myself have done engine swaps in our driveway, ranging from LT1s to VG30DETTs. Once we got the grease off, it was Wow time!
      - Teknoman117 8y ago
        I'm a software engineer and I do most of my own car work. Can't do everything though, I don't have a lot of room for tools that I'd rarely use. Paid someone to fix my air conditioning vents though because I'd have to half disassemble the interior of my car to do it and I knew it would take me longer to do than I could have the car out of commission. I really hate the vacuum controlled vents in mid 2000's Ford trucks. I had a vacuum leak - somewhere.
        VBprogrammer 8y ago
        Motorcycles are great for that. Except for a few really high end modern bikes (mostly BMWs) they are mostly repairable with nothing more than common tools and a little ingenuity.
        Teknoman117 8y ago
        I really should just be riding my bicycle to work...
  - was_boring 8y ago
    I'm convinced most successful programmers can be successful mechanics for the same reason! Most programmers I know tend to be handy in some way, whether that's fixing their own cars (myself), wood working, or some other skill which requires them to think through problems and work with their hands. I actually view fixing cars as not only a hobby of mine, but as a fall back career should I ever become bored of software or need some quick cash.
    - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
      My brother is a mechanic and both worlds have so many similarities. We joke that the big difference is that I got AC during the summer and he doesn't.
    - CamperBob2 8y ago
      That's what I thought, and then I fragged a Ferrari engine. Dunning-Kruger is not a river in Egypt...
      - technothrasher 8y ago
        I leveraged my embedded systems knowledge into a cottage side business rebuilding the old Magneti Marelli ignition modules in 308/328 models with new ARM Cortex based electronics. There's nothing magic about Ferrari engines.
        rxhernandez 8y ago
        It's funny, I've met a lot of people that thought dsp and algorithms engineering to be magic and yet I find those fields to be a straightforward and fun. On the other hand I have a year of professional experience in ARM Cortex M4 programming and I find it to be magic that any somewhat complex embedded system works. Flip one bit the wrong way and the whole fracking system won't even boot. It took me six months and a significant chunk of my professional reputation to get some biomedical algorithms to interface with offline data on a fat16 formatted USB device.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    Most mechanics are hardware hackers. Instead of searching for the problem on stackexchange/stackoverflow, they search service bulletins and automotive message boards. I'm sure that the software in modern cars causes all manner of stupid problems that never existed before, and could be easily eliminated by giving the mechanics access to the source.
  - beat 8y ago
    I grew up working on cars and motorcycles. The mindset is very similar. Since I work more in DevOps than as a developer, I often think of myself as a software mechanic. Interestingly, I find the musician mindset is also very similar, particularly musicians who compose or improvise.
    - pgt 8y ago
      Software Mechanic is a great brand. I'm stealing it :)
      - mml 8y ago
        "Software Janitor" is my personal favorite. I should probably carry around a bag of pencil shavings on principle.
        pgt 8y ago
        Yeah, I used to say CTO = main janitor of tech. Software mechanic says: I don't mind getting my hands dirty while doing intricate work (computers, who understands 'em?). Janitorial work seems to be regarded as lowly drudge work, even though being a good caretaker/warden means preventing problems from occurring in the first place, like watering the garden and keeping leaks in check. Everyone is trying to keep a cupboard in order somewhere :).
        chrisweekly 8y ago
        In my enterprise dev mgr role in maintaining a legacy codebase while introducing new features I used to talk w/ my team in terms of "software gardening".
    - djmips 8y ago
      Exactly, my debugging is so much stronger than my architecture skills that I've been calling myself a software mechanic for a while as well!
    - Jedi72 8y ago
  - winrid 8y ago
    As someone that grew up with mechanical stuff and ended up in software I agree :)
  - codeulike 8y ago
    Its almost as if you could call programming 'software engineering'
- hamandcheese 8y ago
  Or just be savvy enough to use what others put out there. Then again, when I put it that way I begin to worry about mechanics unwittingly infecting cars with malware...
- awalton 8y ago
  It tells me that I really shouldn't buy a Ford car, since apparently billing for repair parts is more important to them than building a robust and repairable car. Adding a tamper resistant circuit to random bits of your car's electronics is adding cost while reducing robustness - who wants that in their car?
  - peterhadlaw 8y ago
    I hate to break it to you, but that's about every manufacturer now. Imagine how it's going to be once "drive-by-wire" becomes the standard. I'm right there with you though, wishing stuff stayed a little more repairable and maintainable.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    Ford is basically stopping production of cars anyway as they found that trucks are more profitable. But yeah, don't buy one of their trucks either. But what manufacturer is an alternative? Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances!
    - cptskippy 8y ago
      > Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances! That's a lie. Yes they have DRM in place to artificially limit the range of certain models, everything else you said is mischaracterization, misrepresentation, and lies. They saw opportunity in offering different ranged batteries of the same model, however the cost to produce two different battery capacities was too high. Instead of hiding this fact from the consumer, they instead offer it as an upgrade path if you one day have a need for the additional range. This sort of thing is done all of the time in manufacturing to streamline costs. They even do it with their Autopilot system, all Model 3s come with the same sensor package but the feature itself is unavailable unless you pay to unlock it. There's an advantage to doing this in that you do not have to guess at what consumer demand will be because you can lock/unlock features as needed in software based on consumer demand.
- chrisshroba 8y ago
  Is this true? There are mechanics everywhere, so why would every one need to learn to program something that could be made by one and sold as a commercial (or open source) project? Sure, there are many types of cars and situations that need handling, but there are far more mechanics than that. I'm genuinely asking this because I often question whether it's true that "everyone should learn to program", or it's more like, "we have a programmer shortage".
  - nimbius 8y ago
    i started learning python in my spare time after I attended a training course for shop software that ran on Linux. As for the pi, theyre awesome. for $30 or so I have a computer powerful enough to pull OBD codes and do pretty much anything else in the shop wirelessly. And if someone drop it, backs over it, or splashes it with friction modifier or something I can just ask my boss for $40 to replace it instead of $1400 for a new laptop.
    - jedberg 8y ago
      Can you point me at some good tutorials on making a pi read ODBC codes?
      - Drdrdrq 8y ago
        Did you mean OBD(2)? There are Bluetooth, wifi and usb controllers available that you can use to read and write data. Some of them are very cheap, not sure how well they work though.
      - geggam 8y ago
        https://www.macchina.cc/ https://www.macchina.cc/
  - tlrobinson 8y ago
    That's certainly true for common problems on common vehicles, but I imagine there is a growing niche of mechanics understand the computer systems behind modern cars more deeply. Will that commercial product still be sold in 30 years to help repair a "classic" Tesla?
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  mechanics don't need to learn programming, but there is a growing industry of people making tools for this kind of thing. It has been around a long time in the aftermarket performance world. People have been reprogramming ecus or attaching add on ecus that intercept signals for a long time.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  I'm a biolermaker¹ with 20 years experience in the trade. Now I operate a laser cutter, have a fairly extensive AutoHotKey script, can navigate my way around the post processor that generates the particular dialect of G-Code our laser prefers, and know a touch of python. I'm definitely an outlier, but I'm not the only computer-nerd-come-metal-fabricator I've worked with. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilermaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilermaker
  - celticninja 8y ago
    * boilermaker, I thought the italics meant it was intentional and was really interested in what you did. I still find it fascinating but wonder what a biolermaker would do?
    - 51lver 8y ago
      The Bio/LeR industry is very innovative but also very secretive so I doubt you will find very much about it.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      It’s an antiquated term that nowadays just means metal fabricator. I’ve never made a boiler. I probably could, but I’m not even qualified to weld pressure vessels. I’d pass the weld tests with a couple of days practice though.
  - __jal 8y ago
    I got serious enough about metalwork to start buying machines about three years ago, but became interested in such things helping a friend who bought a used CNC wood router on a bit of a lark. Spent about a month generating gcode in Perl, and then decided to learn how to use Inventor. And now I have several machines that one generally doesn't find in a second-story urban walkup. (Getting a 400-ish-pound lathe up the steps was how I found my limit there.)
- djbelieny 8y ago
  This is very interesting indeed. Please keep talking ;)
- jjeaff 8y ago
  There are very few mechanics who will actually fix parts unless it is for their own vehicle. Most will just quite the price with a replacement part and move on. Even those that know how to do stuff like this rarely will agree to actually repair anything.
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  If it was legal to do, I'm sure there would be a market so they don't have to, but can readily buy a cheap tool that can do it.
- collyw 8y ago
  I noticed going from my first second hand car probably built in the early 90's or earlier, to my next one from 2000 that there was a lot less stuff that i could fix myself - due to the computerised nature of many things. I wonder of there would be a market for a purely mechanical (modern) car like the old days. (One of the beauties of mountain biking I see being lost is the ability to fix maybe 90% of problems with a small pack of tools that you can carry about with you. I can see electric bikes being problematic for that. They will get you further from civilisation and fail worse).
- stephengillie 8y ago
  And with hybrid and electric cars, mechanics and auto body shops have to know 3-phase electricity too.
John_KZ 8y ago
Congrats, you presented the one and only case where the manufacturers are right: Nobody should tamper with critical control systems. I don't want a DIY arduino-hacked suspension control chip or ABS. Neither would your clients. Unless of course your client understands this and it goes into the service logbook and you take full legal responsibility for any accidents this might cause in the future. However I couldn't care less if my mp3 player has it's EMMC swapped or if my laptop has a third-party LCD replacement.
- coder543 8y ago
  > I don't want a DIY arduino-hacked ... This is a professional service being done by the same professionals who you're paying to actually replace the suspension, brakes, brake lines, or other life-critical components. If you can't trust them to make a good judgement on how or whether to reset tamper detection, then how can you trust them to replace your brakes or suspension in the first place? Surely the idea is that some company would develop and test a process for resetting the tamper detection now that it is apparently legal, and then this tool would be provided to mechanic shops. > and you take full legal responsibility for any accidents this might cause in the future. Do mechanics take full legal responsibility for any accidents caused by replacing your brakes or other things? I'm sure in cases of egregiously negligent behavior, they could probably be sued, but most of the time it would be very difficult to prove that they were the cause. I don't think this would be any different. > Nobody should tamper with critical control systems. If you believe this, it sounds like you buy brand-new-only cars the moment your existing car turns on any kind of fault light. But, assuming you're okay with them swapping in a $2500 replacement instead, do you believe in this idea so strongly that you would pay 10% to 20% of the vehicle's MSRP any time a fault triggers? Keeping in mind that a vehicle's MSRP has very little to do with its used market value. $2500 could easily be 30%+ of a vehicle's actual value at the time that this occurs. I get where you're coming from, but I think the strength of your language is out of proportion with the suggested repairs.
  - Drdrdrq 8y ago
    He has a point though... Cars are manufactured in such way that when something fails, the failure is not catastrophic. Car might not be operational, but it is very rare that malfunction causes a crash. With SW I'm not convinced that the same can be accomplished. If you add 3rd party maintainers to the mix, it gets even worse. I still think the right to repair is worth the risk, just pointing out that it's not so clear cut.
incompatible 8y ago
Perhaps you can use a raspberry pi and a bit of python on the current version, but maybe they will be able to improve the "security" on future versions? Having a legal right to bypass DRM doesn't help if nobody knows how. Also, I wonder how much that $2500 computer and sensor pack costs to manufacture. Perhaps replacing the entire unit with a raspberry pi version would ultimately be the way to go.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  Raspberry pies can't deal with sudden power cycles, that corrupts their storage. I don’t think they are suitable for use as a critical part in a car.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mito88 8y ago

i2c.

jedberg 8y ago

> With a raspberry pi and a bit of python however you can reset this tamper code once the whole assembly is closed. This sentence is interesting to me. It tells me that now mechanics need to learn programming skills to be successful. Software really is eating the world...

ngngngng 8y ago
I'm convinced most successful mechanics could be successful programmers. The skill set of looking at a problem and debugging until you really understand the architecture and design of what you're looking at is very similar in both fields.
- dleslie 8y ago
  American McGee is probably the most famous example of this. > Dead-end jobs followed – washing dishes, polishing rings at a jewelry store, ringing orders at a record store and, finally, fixing Volkswagens at Uncle J.O.'s auto repair shop. > The tinkering that's required of mechanics appealed to the teenage hacker. The $6-an-hour job "was the first time I ever felt like I accomplished something at work," McGee said. > On breaks, covered in grease, he'd write inventory and customer tracking applications for the shop. https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-great-american-mcgee-game/ https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-great-american-mcgee-game/
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    A lot of software engineers around me love poking in their cars
    - astrange 8y ago
      Are they not afraid of regressions?
      - p2t2p 8y ago
        With car it much easier to provide a decent test coverage though :)
    - berbec 8y ago
      My nerdiest friend and myself have done engine swaps in our driveway, ranging from LT1s to VG30DETTs. Once we got the grease off, it was Wow time!
    - Teknoman117 8y ago
      I'm a software engineer and I do most of my own car work. Can't do everything though, I don't have a lot of room for tools that I'd rarely use. Paid someone to fix my air conditioning vents though because I'd have to half disassemble the interior of my car to do it and I knew it would take me longer to do than I could have the car out of commission. I really hate the vacuum controlled vents in mid 2000's Ford trucks. I had a vacuum leak - somewhere.
      - VBprogrammer 8y ago
        Motorcycles are great for that. Except for a few really high end modern bikes (mostly BMWs) they are mostly repairable with nothing more than common tools and a little ingenuity.
        Teknoman117 8y ago
        I really should just be riding my bicycle to work...
- was_boring 8y ago
  I'm convinced most successful programmers can be successful mechanics for the same reason! Most programmers I know tend to be handy in some way, whether that's fixing their own cars (myself), wood working, or some other skill which requires them to think through problems and work with their hands. I actually view fixing cars as not only a hobby of mine, but as a fall back career should I ever become bored of software or need some quick cash.
  - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
    My brother is a mechanic and both worlds have so many similarities. We joke that the big difference is that I got AC during the summer and he doesn't.
  - CamperBob2 8y ago
    That's what I thought, and then I fragged a Ferrari engine. Dunning-Kruger is not a river in Egypt...
    - technothrasher 8y ago
      I leveraged my embedded systems knowledge into a cottage side business rebuilding the old Magneti Marelli ignition modules in 308/328 models with new ARM Cortex based electronics. There's nothing magic about Ferrari engines.
      - rxhernandez 8y ago
        It's funny, I've met a lot of people that thought dsp and algorithms engineering to be magic and yet I find those fields to be a straightforward and fun. On the other hand I have a year of professional experience in ARM Cortex M4 programming and I find it to be magic that any somewhat complex embedded system works. Flip one bit the wrong way and the whole fracking system won't even boot. It took me six months and a significant chunk of my professional reputation to get some biomedical algorithms to interface with offline data on a fat16 formatted USB device.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Most mechanics are hardware hackers. Instead of searching for the problem on stackexchange/stackoverflow, they search service bulletins and automotive message boards. I'm sure that the software in modern cars causes all manner of stupid problems that never existed before, and could be easily eliminated by giving the mechanics access to the source.
- beat 8y ago
  I grew up working on cars and motorcycles. The mindset is very similar. Since I work more in DevOps than as a developer, I often think of myself as a software mechanic. Interestingly, I find the musician mindset is also very similar, particularly musicians who compose or improvise.
  - pgt 8y ago
    Software Mechanic is a great brand. I'm stealing it :)
    - mml 8y ago
      "Software Janitor" is my personal favorite. I should probably carry around a bag of pencil shavings on principle.
      - pgt 8y ago
        Yeah, I used to say CTO = main janitor of tech. Software mechanic says: I don't mind getting my hands dirty while doing intricate work (computers, who understands 'em?). Janitorial work seems to be regarded as lowly drudge work, even though being a good caretaker/warden means preventing problems from occurring in the first place, like watering the garden and keeping leaks in check. Everyone is trying to keep a cupboard in order somewhere :).
        chrisweekly 8y ago
        In my enterprise dev mgr role in maintaining a legacy codebase while introducing new features I used to talk w/ my team in terms of "software gardening".
  - djmips 8y ago
    Exactly, my debugging is so much stronger than my architecture skills that I've been calling myself a software mechanic for a while as well!
  - Jedi72 8y ago
- winrid 8y ago
  As someone that grew up with mechanical stuff and ended up in software I agree :)
- codeulike 8y ago
  Its almost as if you could call programming 'software engineering'
hamandcheese 8y ago
Or just be savvy enough to use what others put out there. Then again, when I put it that way I begin to worry about mechanics unwittingly infecting cars with malware...
awalton 8y ago
It tells me that I really shouldn't buy a Ford car, since apparently billing for repair parts is more important to them than building a robust and repairable car. Adding a tamper resistant circuit to random bits of your car's electronics is adding cost while reducing robustness - who wants that in their car?
- peterhadlaw 8y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but that's about every manufacturer now. Imagine how it's going to be once "drive-by-wire" becomes the standard. I'm right there with you though, wishing stuff stayed a little more repairable and maintainable.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  Ford is basically stopping production of cars anyway as they found that trucks are more profitable. But yeah, don't buy one of their trucks either. But what manufacturer is an alternative? Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances!
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    > Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances! That's a lie. Yes they have DRM in place to artificially limit the range of certain models, everything else you said is mischaracterization, misrepresentation, and lies. They saw opportunity in offering different ranged batteries of the same model, however the cost to produce two different battery capacities was too high. Instead of hiding this fact from the consumer, they instead offer it as an upgrade path if you one day have a need for the additional range. This sort of thing is done all of the time in manufacturing to streamline costs. They even do it with their Autopilot system, all Model 3s come with the same sensor package but the feature itself is unavailable unless you pay to unlock it. There's an advantage to doing this in that you do not have to guess at what consumer demand will be because you can lock/unlock features as needed in software based on consumer demand.
chrisshroba 8y ago
Is this true? There are mechanics everywhere, so why would every one need to learn to program something that could be made by one and sold as a commercial (or open source) project? Sure, there are many types of cars and situations that need handling, but there are far more mechanics than that. I'm genuinely asking this because I often question whether it's true that "everyone should learn to program", or it's more like, "we have a programmer shortage".
- nimbius 8y ago
  i started learning python in my spare time after I attended a training course for shop software that ran on Linux. As for the pi, theyre awesome. for $30 or so I have a computer powerful enough to pull OBD codes and do pretty much anything else in the shop wirelessly. And if someone drop it, backs over it, or splashes it with friction modifier or something I can just ask my boss for $40 to replace it instead of $1400 for a new laptop.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    Can you point me at some good tutorials on making a pi read ODBC codes?
    - Drdrdrq 8y ago
      Did you mean OBD(2)? There are Bluetooth, wifi and usb controllers available that you can use to read and write data. Some of them are very cheap, not sure how well they work though.
    - geggam 8y ago
      https://www.macchina.cc/ https://www.macchina.cc/
- tlrobinson 8y ago
  That's certainly true for common problems on common vehicles, but I imagine there is a growing niche of mechanics understand the computer systems behind modern cars more deeply. Will that commercial product still be sold in 30 years to help repair a "classic" Tesla?
gameswithgo 8y ago
mechanics don't need to learn programming, but there is a growing industry of people making tools for this kind of thing. It has been around a long time in the aftermarket performance world. People have been reprogramming ecus or attaching add on ecus that intercept signals for a long time.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
I'm a biolermaker¹ with 20 years experience in the trade. Now I operate a laser cutter, have a fairly extensive AutoHotKey script, can navigate my way around the post processor that generates the particular dialect of G-Code our laser prefers, and know a touch of python. I'm definitely an outlier, but I'm not the only computer-nerd-come-metal-fabricator I've worked with. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilermaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilermaker
- celticninja 8y ago
  * boilermaker, I thought the italics meant it was intentional and was really interested in what you did. I still find it fascinating but wonder what a biolermaker would do?
  - 51lver 8y ago
    The Bio/LeR industry is very innovative but also very secretive so I doubt you will find very much about it.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    It’s an antiquated term that nowadays just means metal fabricator. I’ve never made a boiler. I probably could, but I’m not even qualified to weld pressure vessels. I’d pass the weld tests with a couple of days practice though.
- __jal 8y ago
  I got serious enough about metalwork to start buying machines about three years ago, but became interested in such things helping a friend who bought a used CNC wood router on a bit of a lark. Spent about a month generating gcode in Perl, and then decided to learn how to use Inventor. And now I have several machines that one generally doesn't find in a second-story urban walkup. (Getting a 400-ish-pound lathe up the steps was how I found my limit there.)
djbelieny 8y ago
This is very interesting indeed. Please keep talking ;)
jjeaff 8y ago
There are very few mechanics who will actually fix parts unless it is for their own vehicle. Most will just quite the price with a replacement part and move on. Even those that know how to do stuff like this rarely will agree to actually repair anything.
hvidgaard 8y ago
If it was legal to do, I'm sure there would be a market so they don't have to, but can readily buy a cheap tool that can do it.
collyw 8y ago
I noticed going from my first second hand car probably built in the early 90's or earlier, to my next one from 2000 that there was a lot less stuff that i could fix myself - due to the computerised nature of many things. I wonder of there would be a market for a purely mechanical (modern) car like the old days. (One of the beauties of mountain biking I see being lost is the ability to fix maybe 90% of problems with a small pack of tools that you can carry about with you. I can see electric bikes being problematic for that. They will get you further from civilisation and fail worse).
stephengillie 8y ago
And with hybrid and electric cars, mechanics and auto body shops have to know 3-phase electricity too.

John_KZ 8y ago

Congrats, you presented the one and only case where the manufacturers are right: Nobody should tamper with critical control systems. I don't want a DIY arduino-hacked suspension control chip or ABS. Neither would your clients. Unless of course your client understands this and it goes into the service logbook and you take full legal responsibility for any accidents this might cause in the future. However I couldn't care less if my mp3 player has it's EMMC swapped or if my laptop has a third-party LCD replacement.

coder543 8y ago
> I don't want a DIY arduino-hacked ... This is a professional service being done by the same professionals who you're paying to actually replace the suspension, brakes, brake lines, or other life-critical components. If you can't trust them to make a good judgement on how or whether to reset tamper detection, then how can you trust them to replace your brakes or suspension in the first place? Surely the idea is that some company would develop and test a process for resetting the tamper detection now that it is apparently legal, and then this tool would be provided to mechanic shops. > and you take full legal responsibility for any accidents this might cause in the future. Do mechanics take full legal responsibility for any accidents caused by replacing your brakes or other things? I'm sure in cases of egregiously negligent behavior, they could probably be sued, but most of the time it would be very difficult to prove that they were the cause. I don't think this would be any different. > Nobody should tamper with critical control systems. If you believe this, it sounds like you buy brand-new-only cars the moment your existing car turns on any kind of fault light. But, assuming you're okay with them swapping in a $2500 replacement instead, do you believe in this idea so strongly that you would pay 10% to 20% of the vehicle's MSRP any time a fault triggers? Keeping in mind that a vehicle's MSRP has very little to do with its used market value. $2500 could easily be 30%+ of a vehicle's actual value at the time that this occurs. I get where you're coming from, but I think the strength of your language is out of proportion with the suggested repairs.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  He has a point though... Cars are manufactured in such way that when something fails, the failure is not catastrophic. Car might not be operational, but it is very rare that malfunction causes a crash. With SW I'm not convinced that the same can be accomplished. If you add 3rd party maintainers to the mix, it gets even worse. I still think the right to repair is worth the risk, just pointing out that it's not so clear cut.

incompatible 8y ago

Perhaps you can use a raspberry pi and a bit of python on the current version, but maybe they will be able to improve the "security" on future versions? Having a legal right to bypass DRM doesn't help if nobody knows how. Also, I wonder how much that $2500 computer and sensor pack costs to manufacture. Perhaps replacing the entire unit with a raspberry pi version would ultimately be the way to go.

tinus_hn 8y ago
Raspberry pies can't deal with sudden power cycles, that corrupts their storage. I don’t think they are suitable for use as a critical part in a car.