Hack Your Car With NI CAN Interfaces and LabVIEW Visão geral Hacking your car? Imagine the possibilities, right? I’m sure several of you are thinking about all of the things you’d like to do to your car to improve the performance, aerodynamics, or just the appearance. But before you start asking about the best way to equip your car with the latest spinning rims and spoilers, let me set the record straight: vehicles have very complex electronic systems that perform a number of tasks to keep you safe, comfortable, and happy. So when I say “hack your car,” I’m talking about hacking into the electronic networks in your vehicle. Throughout this article, I’ll give a brief introduction to the history of why you can hack your car, the type of information you can get, and how you can do it using NI products. Índice 1. A Brief History of On-Board Diagnostics 2. What Information Can You Read? 3. How to Hack Your Car Yourself With NI Tools A Brief History of On-Board Diagnostics Thanks to smog, you can hack into your car’s electronics. Seriously. Federal regulations around vehicle emissions have been a driving force for making vehicle diagnostic information readily available to the public. Let’s look at a simple example of why these standards have emerged. In an over-simplified ideal situation, each car has a closed-loop emissions system. The general flow for this process is that an electronic control unit (ECU) specifies the exact air-to-fuel mixture ratio that is combustible in an engine, the vehicle’s catalytic converter transforms some of the dangerous exhaust gases into environmentally friendly substances, oxygen sensors measure the reaction and provide feedback to the ECU, and the ECU uses this feedback to adjust the air-to-fuel ratio to maintain optimal engine exhaust performance.
Figure 1. A simplified closed-loop emissions system in a vehicle involves an ECU, an engine, a catalytic converter, and oxygen sensors. This sounds like a great system, but what happens when something goes wrong, like an oxygen sensor failure? Unfortunately, when this happens it creates an open-loop emissions system because there is no feedback to the ECU about the emissions from your car. Your car will still work properly, but it could create more pollution. The problem is that there’s actually little incentive for the average driver to get their car fixed in this situation because this open-loop