When I tell other car people that I tuned my car a common follow up question is, “Who did you go with?” They’ll ask if I bought a tune from APR, Unitronic, or some other large corporation. I think one of the reasons for this is the complexity of modern cars. There are so many little computers, wires, and other electronic devices inside modern cars that people assume it’s almost impossible for individuals to understand what’s going on, let alone non-destructively…

The first step to interfacing with the ECU is communicating with the OBD adapter that’s plugged into my car. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I’m using an OBDLink MX Bluetooth adapter to communicate with the car. As this will be my first foray into raw OBD commands, I figured the best place to start would be a terminal interface that would allow me to enter commands manually so that I can test things out. I’d also like to do some general logging of OBD/CAN traffic on my…

Back in 2009 I purchased an OBDLink USB adapter so that I could scan trouble codes from my car using a laptop. The hardware was very nice, but as I messed around with the tool I realized it had a major shortcoming. While I appreciated that ScanTool offered open source software, I was very disappointed that the software was incapable of handling my vehicle’s proprietary protocols. This isn’t really the fault of ScanTool but rather the industry itself. Standardized automotive…