RomRaider

I was speaking with the proprietor of Tuner Tools the other night, and he brought up the J2534 pass through certification that SAE is starting to push. Its more of a domestic US thing I guess, but they are starting to push it on imports too.

It sounds like it will have its ups and downs, especially when it comes to us. Sounds like bandwidth is highly increased, and what you can control and how easily available it is will also increase. It involves much more control of the car, down to being able to deal with headlights, dome lights, stereo and other such things through the cars ECU.

The downsides I can think of are that the parts we would want to access to tune our cars will be more highly encrypted, since Subaru will want to keep many things secret and unalterable. Since J2534 would offer easier access, the manufacturers might be more inclined to try harder to code the parts they don't want accessed. The other thing I can think of, is the fact that SSM might change quite a bit, and that a lot of the hard work we are putting in now might not be transferable to post J2534 pass through enabled cars that come out in the future.

On the upside, there are quite a few companies that have pulled this apart already, and have offered tuning tools to work with it. Since its a standardized format, this may mean that much of the work has already been done. I'm not sure if there are open source people doing this, so it might be commercial only.

I haven't heard either way on whether Subaru will complying with this or not, but I thought I'd bring it up. If we find out that they are in fact going to, would it be worth trying to incorporate it into the current development of RomRaider and other openecu projects? It would be good time to do so, since we are in overhaul mode right now. I know the developers and programmers have a ton on their plates right now, so I don't mean to throw a wrench in the works, I just was wondering about peoples thoughts on this subject. I'd love to have RomRaider support for future vehicles, even if they change SSM significantly to meet new requirements of the industry. Thoughts and discussion would be awesome.

JH

Looks like all the 08's are going that way (The FXT has a CAN bus now and J2534 is our only option). Colby is looking into it as well as myself.

Most of the time, when an entire industry makes an attempt to encrypt or obfuscate something from end-consumers, it's cracked or circumvented in a matter of days. But, if that doesn't happen, RomRaider's value will still remain strong with the current crop of ECUs. Worst case scenario: people buy older RomRaider-capable ECUs as "aftermarket" items to place on their +'08 vehicles .

J

Actually the only thing that has to be cracked is Subaru's calls to the industry standard API, and its not really cracking it. Its even easier than cracking. We have to write a DLL for the cable (there is a published spec where we just make interfaces that a flashing app calls) so the app from Subaru (yes you can buy the app and ROMS from SOA all the way back to 03) can flash their stock ROMS. We can capture the data from the Subaru program once the DLL is written for the cable and then we are set pretty much. No big deal, just need time. Colby is probably already working on it (he is looking into it). I just don't have the time right now.

You guys rock.

J