Ever since Charlie Miller hacked a Jeep while it was driving on the interstate I have wanted to learn more about Car Hacking but really had not had a chance to get started with it until a month ago when I ordered a Carloop and was ready to get hacking:
… or so I thought. Turns out car hacking is hard… like, really-really hard. While I have not “hacked” anything yet I have learned some early lessons:
- The Carloop.io is an amazing tool but the Carloop Pro for $150 is overkill to get started and the Carloop Basic for $55 is all you need (and all the test code is built for it).
- Get a copy of “The Car Hackers Handbook” (You can download it for free here)
- You will need an ODBII Extension Cable.
- You will want to setup a Ubuntu VM with the following tools to start:
Once you get the basic setup down you will spend a lot of time in your driveway and garage doing this:
“Car Hacking” is fairly new and you will likely not find a lot of information about your car online and will have to decode (and hopefully share) a lot of the information you find. Reddit and Twitter have some fairly active discussion groups.
Car Hacking so far has been an amazingly fun project and there are amazing new tools coming out all the time. I just backed Macchina on KickStarter this week and would like to pick up a canb.us. I am sure my car hacking tool kit will continue to grow.
I will be blogging more about my adventures into car hacking over the next couple of months as I learn more and have more to share.
