Redefining V2G: How to Use Your Vehicle as a Game Controller
Reverse engineering vehicle-to-grid communication interfaces and internal vehicle buses to map controls into a custom game input system.
Summary
Vehicle to Grid Communication Interfaces
Modern cars are a complex networks of computers put on four wheels. For security research, it is important to understand the car's internal network and exposed interfaces. But what else could you use this knowledge for? You probably guessed it from the title 🙂. So we developed a tool to turn our research car into a game controller.
Reverse Engineering Internal CAN Buses
In this talk, we present Vehicle-to-Game (V2G), a Python-based project that enables the usage of cars as game controllers. V2G can run either directly on a laptop or turn a Raspberry Pi Zero WH into a Bluetooth gamepad. In addition, V2G can either be used over the OBD2-diagnostic port or by directly accessing the internal CAN-busses of the car.
Building a Vehicle Game Controller
Our project can be a great starting point if you always wanted to tinker around with your car or want to learn about the CAN bus or diagnostic communication (UDS). To make V2G work with your car, some reverse engineering of CAN messages or diagnostic communication will be required (as well as additional hardware to connect to the CAN bus). Otherwise, if you can get this running, you can be sure that you own a more expensive game controller than your neighbors.
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