I'm developing an Android app that uses an ELM327 device for OBD-II communications, and I'd like to be able to get the status of the headlights. Specifically, I would like to know if the driver has turned them on or not, but it would also be moderately useful to be able to tell what lights are on (mains vs brights vs DRLs and so on) and whether or not any of the bulbs are out. I was under the impression that there were ways of figuring out whether the headlights were on over OBD-II, but I can't find anything to confirm that, and the API I'm using (the pires obd-java-api on Github) doesn't have anything in it either. Can I actually do any of this?
All the standardized OBD PIDs are within ISO 15031-5 standard. Some part of it can be found in Wikipedia and here as well. All the other PIDs are vehicle specific PIDs which you cannot generalized (or even find) them.
The PIDs that you are searching for might not be standard or supported by every vehicle.
Related
I created an AIR app which sends an ID to my server to verify the user's licence.
I created it using
NetworkInfo.networkInfo.findInterfaces() and I use the first "name" value for "displayName" containing "LAN" (or first mac address I get if the user is on a MAC).
But I get a problem:
sometime users connect to internet using an USB stick (given from a mobile phone company) and it changes the serial number I get; probably the USB stick becomes the first value in the vector of findInterfaces().
I could take the last value, but I think I could get similar problems too.
So is there a better way to identify the computer even with this small hardware changes?
It would be nice to get motherboard or CPU serial, but it seems to be not possible. I've found some workaround to get it, but working on WIN and not on a MAC.
I don't want to store data on the user computer for authentication to set "a little" more difficult to hack the software.
Any idea?
Thanks
Nadia
So is there a better way to identify the computer even with this small hardware changes?
No, there is no best practices to identify personal computer and build on this user licensing for the software. You should use server-side/licensing-manager to provide such functional. Also it will give your users flexibility with your desktop software. It's much easier as for product owner (You don't have call center that will respond on every call with changed Network card, hard drive, whatever) and for users to use such product.
Briefly speaking, user's personal computer is insecure (frankly speaking you don't have options to store something valuable) and very dynamic environment (There is very short cycle on the hardware to use it as part of licensing program).
I am in much the same boat as you, and I am now finally starting to address this... I have researched this for over a year and there are a couple options out there.
The biggest thing to watch out for when using a 3rd party system is the leach effect. Nearly all of them want a percentage of your profit - which in my mind makes it nothing more than vampireware. This is on top of a percentage you WILL pay to paypal, merchant processor, etc.
The route I will end up taking is creating a secondary ANE probably written in Java because of 1) Transitioning my knowledge 2) Ability to run on various architectures. I have to concede this solution is not fool proof since reverse engineering of java is nearly as easy as anything running on FP. The point is to just make it harder, not bullet proof.
As a side note - any naysayers of changing CPU / Motherboard - this is extremely rare if not no longer even done. I work on a laptop and obviously once that hardware cycle is over, I need to reregister everything on a new one. So please...
Zarqon was developed by: Cliff Hall
This appears to be a good solution for small scale. The reason I do not believe it scales well based on documentation (say beyond a few thousand users) is it appears to be a completely manual process ie-no ability to tie into a payment system to then auto-gen / notify the user of the key (I could be wrong about this).
Other helpful resources:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_paypal.html
I want to move away from socket.io to regular websockets to take advantage of the binary data transfers and get rid of the base64 encoding.
There seem to be two main websocket libraries for nodejs, both are on github:
Worlize/WebSocket-Node
einaros/ws
Both seem to be getting regular updates, both claim to be supporting the RFC-6455 standard.
Does anyone have experience with either or both of these who can share experience and/or make recommendations? Or does anyone know where I can find a recent comparison of them?
Further are there any plans for an official server side Websocket interface standard? These two libraries seem to have different API's. I did find this, but it is clearly for the client side only, and significantly newer than the date on the RFC standard.
I have been looking through every variation of Google search I can think of, and many related StackOverflow questions, but none seem to answer my question, and even the top Google results on the subject are several years out of date. Some related but insufficient StackOverflow threads include:
which-websocket-library-to-use-with-node-js
are-websockets-really-meant-to-be-handled-by-web-servers
web-sockets-server-side-implementation-for-nodejs
einaros/ws works great. However, Websocket-Node comes with routing support, which is quite handy for non-trivial implementations.
I have to pull two pre-printed (not hand-written) fields out of a paper form, such that it can be automatically routed after being scanned. The fields contain batch and item identifiers, like "GG-9192" or "EPN/245G".
I've tried the following software:
Tesseract-OCR
Cuneiform
Canon ImageRunner built-in OCR
Asprise OCR Java API (demo)
I've tried the following settings:
Scanning at resolutions of 300dpi and 600dpi
Tried different fonts, including OCR-A and OCR-B.
In all cases output was pretty much all over the place. I can kick back documents for which I can't properly extract the necessary information, but I'm thinking it's going to be at least half of them. I considered some sort of fuzzy logic based on known values in a database, but sometimes these identifiers can differ by a single character, like "123G" and "123C".
Is this a lost cause? Perhaps OCR just isn't mature enough to handle a requirement of this nature? What other techniques might you recommend? Barcodes?
Edit: the containing application is in Java, so any recommendations for which there are free or cheap Java-based APIs for would help.
Edit 2: if anyone is interested...without any special tuning, Cuneiform for Linux and the Canon ImageRunner worked best, with Tesserect-OCR and Asprise Java API producing the worst results...none of the four was acceptable for anything but standard document search grade OCR. I'm beginning to think that this isn't going to work out.
If you have control over the fields, why use a human-readable format in the first place? For scanning, it seems like a QR Code, or something similar would be best. It is marked for orientation, and has some built-in error correction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code
I started digging for products starting with Tomato's suggestion. I tried ABBYY and CVISION. Both have products that can automate OCR:
CVISION Maestro Recognition Server 4.0
ABBYY Recognition Server 2.0
In addition, ABBYY has SDKs for various platforms, and CVISION has an SDK that appears to work with at least VB/VC++.
I haven't tried either SDK yet, and am not sure it's necessary for my project. All I need is PDFs coming in that I can extract the text from. I did however try CVISION's server product and with the OCR on its most accurate settings, it worked really well. I haven't tried ABBYY's server product yet because I have to go through a reseller to get a trial. I'm in the process of doing so, but if it starts getting annoying I'm probably going to go with CVISION. I did try ABBYY's FineReader standalone product, and it worked very well, so I assume that their server product would also.
Are there benefits to developing an application on two or more different platforms? Does using a different compiler on even the same platform have benefits?
Yes, especially if you plan to distribute your code for multiple platforms.
But even if you don't cross platform development is a form of futureproofing; if it runs on multiple (diverse) platforms today, it's more likely to run on future platforms than something that was tuned, tweeked, and specialized to work on a version 7.8.3 clean install of vendor X's Q-series boxes (patch level 1452) and nothing else.
There seems to be a benefit in finding and simply preventing bugs with a different compiler and a different OS. Different CPUs can pin down endian issues early. There is the pain at the GUI level if you want to stay native at that level.
Short answer: Yes.
Short of cloning a disk, it is almost impossible to make two systems exactly alike, so you are going to end up running on "different platforms" whether you meant to or not. By specifically confronting and solving the "what if system A doesn't do things like B?" problem head on you are much more likely to find those key assumptions your code makes.
That said, I would say you should get a good chunk of your base code working on system A, and then take a day (or a week or ...) and get it running on system B. It can be very educational.
My education came back in the 80's when I ported a source level C debugger to over 100 flavors of U*NX. Gack!
Are there benefits to developing an application on two or more different platforms?
If this is production software, the obvious reason is the lure of a larger client base. Your product's appeal is magnified the moment the client hears that you support multiple platforms. Remember, most enterprises do not use a single OS or even a single version of the OS. It is fairly typical to find a section using Windows, another Mac and a smaller version some flavor of Linux.
It is also seen that customizing a product for a single platform is often far more tedious than to have it run on multi-platform. The law of diminishing returns kicks in even before you know.
Of course, all of this makes little sense, if you are doing customization work for an existing product for the client's proprietary hardware. But even then, keep an eye out for the entire range of hardware your client has in his repertoire -- you never know when he might ask for it.
Does using a different compiler on even the same platform have benefits?
Yes, again. Different compilers implement different extensions. See to it that you are not dependent on a particular version of a particular compiler.
Further, there may be a bug or two in the compiler itself. Using multiple compilers helps sort these out.
I have further seen bits of a (cross-platform) product using two different compilers -- one was to used in those modules where floating point manipulation required a very high level of accuracy. (Been a while I've heard anyone else do that, but ...)
I've ported a large C++ program, originally Win32, to Linux. It wasn't very difficult. Mostly dealing with compiler incompatibilities, because the MS C++ compiler at the time was non-compliant in various ways. I expect that problem has mostly gone now (until C++0x features start gradually appearing). Also writing a simple platform abstraction library to centralize the platform-specific code in one place. It depends to what extent you are dependent on services from the OS that would be hard to mimic on a new platform.
You don't have to build portability in from the ground up. That's why "porting" is often described as an activity you can perform in one shot after an initial release on your most important platform. You don't have to do it continuously from the very start. Purely for economic reasons, if you can avoid doing work that may never pay off, obviously you should. The cost of porting later on, when really necessary, turns out to be not that bad.
Mostly, there is an existing platform where the application is written for (individual software). But you adress more developers (both platforms), if you decide to provide an independent language.
Also products (standard software) for SMEs can be sold better if they run on different platforms! You can gain access to both markets, WIN&LINUX! (and MacOSx and so on...)
Big companies mostly buy hardware which is supported/certified by the product vendor only to deploy the specified product.
If you develop on multiple platforms at the same time you get the advantage of being able to use different tools. For example I once had a memory overwrite (I still swear I didn't need the +1 for the null byte!) that cause "free" to crash. I brought the code up to speed on Windows and found the overwrite in about 1 minute with Rational Purify... it had taken me a week under Linux of chasing it (valgrind might have found it... but I didn't know about it at the time).
Different compilers on the same or different platforms is, to me, a must as each compiler will report different things, and sometimes the report from one compiler about an error will be gibberish but the other compiler makes it very clear.
Using things like multiple databases while developing means you are much less likely to tie yourself to a particular database which means you can swap out the database if there is a reason to do so. If you want to integrate something that uses Oracle into a existing infrastructure that uses SQL Server for example it can really suck - much better if the Oracle or SQL Server pieces can be moved to the other system (I know of some places that have 3 different databases for their financial systems... ick).
In general, always developing for two or three things means that the odds of you finding mistakes is better, and the odds of the system being more flexible is better.
On the other hand all of that can take time and effort that, at the immediate time, is seen as an unneeded expense.
Some platforms have really dreadful development tools. I once worked in an IB where rather than use Sun's ghastly toolset, peole developed code in VC++ and then ported to Solaris.
A friend of mine brought up this questiont he other day, he's recently bought a garmin heart rate moniter device which keeps track of his heart rate and allows him to upload his heart rate stats for a day to his computer.
The only problem is there are no linux drivers for the garmin USB device, he's managed to interpret some of the data, such as the model number and his user details and has identified that there are some binary datatables essentially which we assume represent a series of recordings of his heart rate and the time the recording was taken.
Where does one start when reverse engineering data when you know nothing about the structure?
I had the same problem and initially found this project at Google Code that aims to complete a cross-platform version of tools for the Garmin devices ... see: http://code.google.com/p/garmintools/. There's a link on the front page of that project to the protocols you need, which Garmin was thoughtful enough to release publically.
And here's a direct link to the Garmin I/O specification: http://www.garmin.com/support/pdf/IOSDK.zip
I'd start looking at the data in a hexadecimal editor, hopefully a good one which knows the most common encodings (ASCII, Unicode, etc.) and then try to make sense of it out of the data you know it has stored.
As another poster mentioned, reverse engineering can be hairy, not in practice but in legality.
That being said, you may be able to find everything related to your root question at hand by checking out this project and its' code...and they do handle the runner's heart rate/GPS combo data as well
http://www.gpsbabel.org/
I'd suggest you start with checking the legality of reverse engineering in your country of origin. Most countries have very strict laws about what is allowed and what isn't regarding reverse engineering devices and code.
I would start by seeing what data is being sent by the device, then consider how such data could be represented and packed.
I would first capture many samples, and see if any pattern presents itself, since heart beat is something which is regular and that would suggest it is measurement related to the heart itself. I would also look for bit fields which are monotonically increasing, as that would suggest some sort of time stamp.
Having formed a hypothesis for what is where, I would write a program to test it and graph the results and see if it makes sense. If it does but not quite, then closer inspection would probably reveal you need some scaling factors here or there. It is also entirely possible I need to process the data first before it looks anything like what their program is showing, i.e. might need to integrate the data points. If I get garbage, then it is back to the drawing board :-)
I would also check the manufacturer's website, or maybe run strings on their binaries. Finding someone who works in the field of biomedical engineering would also be on my list, as they would probably know what protocols are typically used, if any. I would also look for these protocols and see if any could be applied to the data I am seeing.
I'd start by creating a hex dump of the data. Figure it's probably blocked in some power-of-two-sized chunks. Start looking for repeating patterns. Think about what kind of data they're probably sending. Either they're recording each heart beat individually, or they're recording whatever the sensor is sending at fixed intervals. If it's individual beats, then there's going to be a time delta (since the last beat), a duration, and a max or avg strength of some sort. If it's fixed intervals, then it'll probably be a simple vector of readings. There'll probably be a preamble of some sort, with a start timestamp and the sampling rate. You can try decoding the timestamp yourself, or you might try simply feeding it to ctime() and see if they're using standard absolute time format.
Keep in mind that lots of cheap A/D converters only produce 12-bit outputs, so your readings are unlikely to be larger than 16 bits (and the high-order 4 bits may be used for flags). I'd recommend resetting the device so that it's "blank", dumping and storing the contents, then take a set of readings, record the results (whatever the device normally reports), then dump the contents again and try to correlate the recorded results with whatever data appeared after the "blank" dump.
Unsure if this is what you're looking for but Garmin has created an API that runs with your browser. It seems OSX is supported, as well as Windows browsers... I would try it from Google Chromium to see if it can be used instead of this reverse engineering...
http://developer.garmin.com/web-device/garmin-communicator-plugin/
API Features
Auto-detection of devices connected to a computer Access to device
product information like product name and software version Read
tracks, routes and waypoints from supported recreational, fitness and
navigation devices Write tracks, routes and waypoints to supported
recreational, fitness and navigation devices Read fitness data from
supported fitness devices Geo-code address and save to a device as a
waypoint or favorite Read and write Garmin XML files (GPX and TCX) as
well as binary files. Support for most Garmin devices (USB, USB
mass-storage, most serial devices) Support for Internet Explorer,
Firefox and Chrome on Microsoft Windows. Support for Safari, Firefox
and Chrome on Mac OS X.
Can you synthesize a heart beat using something like a computer speaker? (I have no idea how such devices actually work). Watch how the binary results change based on different inputs.
Ripping apart the device and checking out what's inside would probably help too.