Hackaday Prize Entry: A Tiny Tool for Car Hacking - Hackaday
A car from 1940 would have been an almost completely mechanical device. the design details of which automotive manufacturers would love to keep out of the hands of hardware hackers like us. [Mastro Gippo] wanted to build a small and powerful CAN bus reverse engineering tool, and the Crunchtrack hits it out of the park. It’s a CAN bus transceiver, GPS receiver, and GSM modem all wrapped up into a single tiny device that fits under your dash. [Mastro] has a slight fetish for efficiency and tiny, tiny devices, so he’s packaging everything inside the shell of a standard ELM327 Bluetooth adapter. This is a device that can fit in the palm of your hand, but still taps a CAN bus (with the help of a computer), receives GPS, and sends that data out over cell phone towers. The device is based on the STM32 F3 ARM microcontroller (with mbed support), a ublox 7 GPS module, and an SIM800 GSM module, but the story doesn’t stop with hardware. [Mastro] is also working on a website where reverse engineering data can be shared between car hackers. Much easier to use a tow truck and hook the car (depending on how it was parked, I could hook-and-go, in about 45 seconds). Force consumers to physically walk into a bank (none of this online banking stuff – if the records are not on databases exposed to the public, it’s not ‘hackable’ – we used to have dedicated T1 circuits to a “mainframe” – not publicly. Source: hackaday.com
