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by stolio 4163 days ago
Pulling out your old throttle system is hard. It's self-protecting, the difficulty keeps the uninitiated from doing anything too stupid.

Copy/pasting code from the internet is easy, so it has to be made artificially difficult. We live in a world where people put their iPhones in microwaves because they heard it would charge the battery. We have to keep these people very far away from the internal workings of their cars.
1 comments
MrDom 4163 days ago
Have you ever tried to program a controller? It's hard too. You need special hardware, special software and know how to connect them all up. It's not just copying and pasting code from the internet. It's sufficiently discouraging for those who think microwaves are wireless battery chargers. :)

If you're curious, you should poke around http://endless-sphere.com/forums/.

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stolio 4163 days ago
I appreciate the link, but at this point I'm not going to buy a car if I don't trust and like the engineers who built it. My "improvements" generally aren't :)

Even with needing special hardware and software I'm not happy about it the tinkering. Cars are too much: 3,500 lbs of metal going 40 mph with 10 gallons of gas in it is a lot to go wrong.

I hate DRM, I really do. And I think we should have kids programming Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's by junior high, but part of me thinks they should bury the computers so deep in the engine bay you have to pull the engine to get to 'em. It's just my opinion, but if you don't have a (relevant) PE license, minimum, you shouldn't be allowed to mess with ECU's in cars that go on public roads.

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