Nowadays, vehicles have become an essential part of dailylife, and their stability is critical for our safety and efficiency, makingefficient and in-time maintenance increasingly important. Vehicle diagnosis andflashing involve using specialized tools to identify and fix issues within avehicle's electronic systems. Diagnosis tools read and interpret vehicle datathrough the OBD interface, and figure out the errors to be solved. Flashingupdates the vehicle's software to improve performance, fix bugs, or add newfeatures. These processes help maintain the vehicle's optimal performance andsafety, addressing potential malfunctions proactively to reduce the risk ofaccidents and protect road safety. However, current methods often requireengineers to stay inside the vehicle physically to get connected and retrievedata, and they can only work on one vehicle at one time, which is bothinconvenient and inefficient.
Our project aims to build a tool to solve this problem. The toolmainly has two parts, a device to be plugged into the OBD interface to getvehicle data and an Ethernet to support communication between the controllingsoftware and multiple devices. We design the device as a PCB board integratingcomponents to deal with instructions and connect with the Ethernet, including aRaspberry Pi Zero and a USB Wi-Fi card. It also has three LEDs as the statusindicators and a reset button. Allcomponents are carefully selected to reduce the size and power consumption. Thenetwork topology is also designed intently to maintain efficiency, stability,and safety. After all devices and the computer are connected, the controllingsoftware can then view vehicle information, select the target by IP address, senddiagnostic instructions, or set the device to sleep mode to save power.
Our project enables engineers to diagnose and flash vehicleswirelessly, and operate on multiple vehicles simultaneously with high stabilityand efficiency. It is also user-friendly with an easy-to-carry device andsimple controlling software. The design strictly adheres to ISO-13400 andISO-14229 standards. In the future, more helpful aid tools can also bedeveloped based on the software interface.
