I ordered a vehicle-bus-to-serial converter last year, but never got around to playing with it. This lets me examine all the sensors on my vehicle’s sensor bus. Stuff like RPM, speed, engine load, etc. It also works as a code-scanner if something bad happens. One harmless example is if the gas cap isn’t tightened all the way, it’ll set a code, and my “check engine” light will come on. With this, I can clear the code, tighten the gas cap, and get on with my life. :)
I was really excited to see that the ScanTool folks released their software under the GPL. Someone else had already gotten it compiled under Linux, but his website is down right now. So, impatient person that I am, I went ahead and installed Allegro and DZComm. DZComm needed a little work to be happy with my USB-to-serial converter, but once that was done, I got to drive around with Bryce reading me my engine load off the laptop. Fun!
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.