Comment by ignormies
3 years ago
Cool project! How much time have you spent sitting in your car with a laptop, or did you excise the headunit from the car?
3 years ago
Cool project! How much time have you spent sitting in your car with a laptop, or did you excise the headunit from the car?
Thanks :) My friends and I have made a few jokes about hacking my literal "daily driver". TLDR; didn't excise, mostly sat in my car.
I originally rooted the car using Honda Hack via http://www.autohack.org/. A paid service that afaik uses a webkit exploit and probably an old Android kernel exploit to gain root. Part of the motivation for this project was to encourage others to release open-source rooting tools so they don't have to shell out the $25 for the "pro" version that I did.
Once I had root, I installed a few apps via a USB drive, including a file manager and a third-party app for ADB over TCP (I don't think 4.2.2 had built-in support for networked ADB). Then I connected my car to a Wi-Fi hotspot on my phone (at one point editing Android's wpa_supplicant.conf file directly because it got corrupted). Once I made sure that the headunit would autostart ADB over TCP and always try to connect to a certain Wi-Fi network, I had a decent safety net.
So I spent a good amount of time sitting in my car with a laptop after that though I was able to pull partitions via dd and do a lot of research sitting at my desk, especially static analysis of APKs, native libs, and binaries, stopping back at my car on occasion to grep gpio pins or sysfs values.
I didn't want to risk pulling the headunit from the car; that was (and is) an emergency fallback in case I ever wipe flash or something and need to reflash to the physical board. Fortunately I never had the need. I'd be great to get detailed pictures of the unit though. A quick eBay search shows headunits going for ~$1,000, which imo is ridiculous given that they're glorified Android tablets c. 2012. But if anyone has an extra they're looking to donate, definitely get in touch
> Part of the motivation for this project was to encourage others to release open-source rooting tools so they don't have to shell out the $25 for the "pro" version that I did.
I took a quick look at it, someone could easily remove the license check, unlock the pro features and set up an easy to use site for it
I also paid for Honda Hack. I'm curious if you have the same issue as I where once I rooted with Honda Hack, Carplay seems to be extremely buggy where it often doesn't work without several reboots and/or stopping/starting the car. Haven't been able to pinpoint why this is other than the extra features are just bogging down the ancient hardware to a point that it's destabilizing.
This is the issue I always have with car interface hacking - its uncomfortable and batteries suffer!
Yea if I get more into the hardware hacking side of things, it'd be great if I could add a wire harness to be able to connect external power to the headunit/disconnect it from the car battery. I never had to fully disconnect battery terminals or anything but I had some scares with slow reboot times. I also want to look into LoRa or similar wireless tech to be able to send terminal commands to the car from my desk
Nothing like sitting in my lx with my laptop and techstream running while my steering wheel tries to reset its position and crush my laptop.