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Comment by chrisshroba | Hacker News Reader

Is this true? There are mechanics everywhere, so why would every one need to learn to program something that could be made by one and sold as a commercial (or open source) project? Sure, there are many types of cars and situations that need handling, but there are far more mechanics than that.

I'm genuinely asking this because I often question whether it's true that "everyone should learn to program", or it's more like, "we have a programmer shortage".

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I think in cases like this they mean "programming" in the same way we use "cooking". Almost everyone can 'cook' at least a few things but only a few people are actual "cooks".

You could buy a commercial product to do what's fairly trivial (write to a couple of HW registers) that only support select models (because they all have their own registers/addresses). You could also just learn what HW registers are and some general techniques to change them and figure it out for any model that rolls in the shop as you need it. The better mechanics can even extrapolate fixes to completely new but related issues.

> I often question whether it's true that "everyone should learn to program", or it's more like, "we have a programmer shortage".

I don't think the parent was saying either of those things. Cars are no longer mechanical devices; they're full of computers now. In order to service any modern car, you need an increasing level of computer tools & training. This has been a growing problem for a long time for independent mechanics who have had no choice but to refer people to the dealerships, due both to proprietary digital systems in the cars, and to the copyright laws that prevented legal home and third-party repairs.

> so why would every one need to learn to program something that could be made by one and sold as a commercial (or open source) project?

Maybe this is a theoretical question, as opposed to a practical one? Car manufacturers today are, by and large, not shipping open source products, and until now it has been illegal to reverse engineer those products, so no open source project could legally exist.

* BTW, total tangent of a side note, but might be interesting to you: the US Department of Defense (and I think other branches of the government too) define "commercial" software in a way that includes open source, in other words open source is commercial. The reason is that OSS comes with a license, it's not to do with whether the software costs money, nor whether the source code is distributed with the software. https://dodcio.defense.gov/open-source-software-faq/#Q:_Is_o...

i started learning python in my spare time after I attended a training course for shop software that ran on Linux. As for the pi, theyre awesome. for $30 or so I have a computer powerful enough to pull OBD codes and do pretty much anything else in the shop wirelessly. And if someone drop it, backs over it, or splashes it with friction modifier or something I can just ask my boss for $40 to replace it instead of $1400 for a new laptop.

Can you point me at some good tutorials on making a pi read ODBC codes?

Did you mean OBD(2)? There are Bluetooth, wifi and usb controllers available that you can use to read and write data. Some of them are very cheap, not sure how well they work though.

https://www.macchina.cc/

In order to change the brakes on the rear of a Volkswagen you need a computer in order to retract the electronically adjusted calipers. This doesn't answer your question but it does exemplify the current situation. Cars aren't purely mechanical devices anymore. Computers play a large role in their operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_park_brake

I find this a bit scary --- mainly because I'm used to cars where the (mechanical) parking brake also can be an emergency brake, and the solid linkage between the lever and the braking mechanism means it is still usable even if all other power is lost. (It's also analog, unlike the "push to set parking brake" on/off behaviour --- especially useful for modulated emergency braking.)

That's certainly true for common problems on common vehicles, but I imagine there is a growing niche of mechanics understand the computer systems behind modern cars more deeply.

Will that commercial product still be sold in 30 years to help repair a "classic" Tesla?

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