>2021 Honda Civic >2012 software and hardware Oy vey.
that's automotive engineering for you lol. aviation is similar
Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
21–30 of 45 posts
Re: Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
#22i would love something like that for the newest Piaggio MP3 unit... it's really bad
Re: Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
#23>2021 Honda Civic >2012 software and hardware Oy vey.
The 10th gen Civic ran from 2016-2022 with the same infotainment setup. So it's a 2016 car with 2012 software. That's very reasonable.
And the benefit to that is that it's easy to hack since there's an RCE in the old browser. So you can jailbreak your own car. (It doesn't have a cellular data connection so it's not a security risk)
Re: Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
#24Cool project! How much time have you spent sitting in your car with a laptop, or did you excise the headunit from the car?
This is the issue I always have with car interface hacking - its uncomfortable and batteries suffer!
Re: Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
#25Would love if this ported to the 2021 Honda Accord as well. I would love a custom button to turn on the rear camera for easier parking, longer dwell time after shifting into drive, etc. Keep up the good work!
As far as I currently understand it, most of the code on my headunit is probably 99% identical to the code on 2021 Accord units. Same goes for Acura cars; I can't publish the APK files themselves but there are Acura versions of Honda logos in most of the APKs. Also check out some of the APK filenames: https://github.com/librick/ic1101/blob/main/docs/apk-hashes.....
I welcome PRs/contributions from the community; things like Honda-internal model numbers represent a non-technical obstacle for me as a lone developer. It'd be great to see boot/recovery images for similar vehicles, Accords included.
One of my goals is right-to-repair adjacent. I bought a Honda in the first place because they have a reputation for having an active modding scene and I see value in that positive feedback loop. Hopefully having the repo as a resource helps other people do more hardware mods or manufacture cheaper/consumer-friendly replacement parts.
I've considered trying to make an open source replacement of the /sbin/earlyrvc binary for rear camera hacking specifically. I caught a lucky break because the binary includes logging messages left in by the Honda devs and the messages include method names.
Thanks for the kind words and encouragement :)
Re: Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
#26I have a Toyota RAV4, about 2016, with the built-in system. It's silly amounts of awful when it comes to bad UX. Enough so that I am considering buying a head unit.
Bafflingly, I can't find head units that recognize and obey MP3 playlists. I would have thought that functionality would be a given.
Re: Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
#27Would love if this ported to the 2021 Honda Accord as well. I would love a custom button to turn on the rear camera for easier parking, longer dwell time after shifting into drive, etc. Keep up the good work!
What would be really nice is to use the rear camera as a dash cam when driving.
The apparent jankiness of the rear camera was one of the first reasons I started hacking on the car tbh. It was weird to me that the yellow guidelines/overlay don't appear on the camera feed until a little while after the camera feed first shows up. I've confirmed that it's a two stage process controlled in part by the /sbin/earlyrvc binary and later accessed via an Android service. But I'm not sure why the Honda devs didn't include rear camera dash cam functionality. Especially because you can use the side camera while driving, but not the rear camera. My working theory is that there's some sort of limitation with frame buffers or processing power but . I definitely encourage other devs to look into this too
Re: Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
#28> initial commit pls dont sue
This feels like when people post content and include "no copyright infringement intended" in the description.
Re: Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
#29Cool project! How much time have you spent sitting in your car with a laptop, or did you excise the headunit from the car?
This is the issue I always have with car interface hacking - its uncomfortable and batteries suffer!
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.
Re: Show HN: Honda Civic Infotainment Reverse-Engineering
#30Cool 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