Have You Jailbroken Your Ford Lately?
At a not-too-distant point in our future, this will be a serious question. Today Ford and Bug Labs announced that they are jointly supporting the first open source car software. Think of it as your car's API. You'll need to install a small $40 piece of hardware to interact with the car systems, and the effort, called OpenXC, is making this data available to both Android and Arduino platforms. What can you do for starters? Things like read real-time data about your car's position and speed, and a dozen other measurements about your car's performance. "OpenXC opens up a previously opaque environment to an entirely new class of developers, who will bring more ideas and solutions to the table than any one company or industry consortium could dream up," according to information posted on the site.
