jmccorm
Well-Known Member
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- #496
Hey, thanks! I've been trying to make progress in the face of some headwinds in my personal life, so that's really good to hear right now. As far as progress goes, if we've been moving down the Gartner Hype Cycle, it'd say that things are right around here...I just wanted to say keep up the good work.
The good news is that we're on the Slope of Enlightenment. We've already made the occasion jump to the Plateau of Productivity, but today we know exactly what it'll take to reach that target on a full-time basis.
The first milestone is to regularly and safely perform "Write to Identifier" commands (that's the function we use to update vehicle parameters). Right now, I'm working on a general purpose "Read by Identifier" command. We'll be there soon enough.
The second is to know which vehicle parameters are stored where and how they're encoded. And we've actually reversed engineered quite a number of values purely from observing the vehicle itself. You'll see those on the first tab of our Google Docs spreadsheet. (Downloadable from here.) But we've decoded others (the UDS functions on the fourth tab) thanks to third party tools (JScan in particular). Unfortunately, we've only scratched the surface in what turns out to be a very labor intensive effort.
Really, you either need direct access to the manufacturer's specifications, or you'd need to dump and reverse engineer a device that was built from those same specifications. And you need to pull all that information into a usable form, en-masse. I am NOT confident about hitting that second milestone. And without it, we're blind to all the read and write operations that are out there. We're flying blind.
YES. But I think it's a spectrum?I assume Jscan, Tazer, AlphaOBD, and ECRI all went through what you are doing so somebody logging this will just help expand the options available or help further development.
Some have clear markings of a reverse engineered approach. Some appear to have been built directly from manufacturer specifications (or dumped and reversed engineered the specifications from another tool that officially was). Both paths have their trade-offs. All have my respect. I'm not judging... I'm jealous! ?
Either way, you're right about the approach we're taking here in this thread. We're publicly documenting what we learn as we go along. If a commercial users take advantage of what we share and don't contribute anything back, the worst case is that Wrangler owners find themselves with better choices than they would have had before. ?
EDIT: Typo, grammar.
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