Hack Your Ride With M2 by Macchina!

Ever wish you could customize your car? Thanks to Macchina’s latest Kickstarter campaign, you can. The M2 is a new open source, versatile development platform for automotive tinkering.

M2 boasts a compact, modular design, and is made up of two parts. The processor board is based on a shrunken-down Arduino Due (Microchip SAM3X8E) along with a USB port, some LEDs, an SD card slot, and EEPROM built-in. Meanwhile, the interface board packs multiple CAN channels, GMLAN, LIN/K-LINE, as well as J1850 VPW/PWM.

Measuring just 2.22" x 1.60" x 0.62" in size, the device can be wired under the hood for a more permanent installation or plugged into your vehicle’s OBD-II port.

What’s neat is that M2 also accommodates a wide variety of wireless options thanks to its Digi XBee form-factor socket. This enables you to easily connect your whip to the IoT using BLE, Wi-Fi, GSM, LTE, and other modules.

Macchina believes that its highly-adaptable hardware interface will be extremely useful to hot rodders, mechanics, students, security researchers, and entrepreneurs by providing them with access to the inner workings of most cars.

The platform can be programmed using the latest Arduino IDE, and is (or will soon be) compatible with a number of software packages including SavvyCAN, CanCAT, MetaSploit, CANtact, and pretty much all SocketCAN applications.

Ready to get started? You can read more about M2, its specs, and pre-order one for yourself on Macchina’s Kickstarter page.