Car hacking: Success!

Q: What has four wheels and sixteen hackers clustered around it?

A: Chris Peplin’s sweet ride, with a prototype OpenXC translator plugged into it!

On Friday, i3 Detroit’s first car hacking meetup brought a good turnout, with pizza and drinks and solder and software and tons of fascinating ideas. The mix of attendees included several industry experts, some hobbyists of varying experience, and a few curious newbies.

We were treated to the first public demonstration of the recently-released OpenXC platform, a standard API for interfacing aftermarket software into vehicles. Unlike common OBD2 interfaces that only work with a limited set of messages, OpenXC decodes the live CAN traffic and reveals lots more data, neatly formatted as JSON for your apps to parse.

What sort of apps? Well, that’s up to you — come to the next car hacking meetup (fourth Fridays) and get involved!