Roman Garms' Blog

How Does the 2014-2019 Mazda Connect Infotainment Work?  The infotainment system in my 2015 Mazda 3 is incredibly strange. The entire infotainment "operating system" that you see is nothing more than the Opera web browser showing regular old HTML, JS, and CSS web pages. As strange as this solution is, this offers amazing possibilities that most other car infotainment systems don't allow for. Unlike my old Audi running QNX or something equally strange, the Mazda runs a regular version of Linux with a very normal web browser. In fact, it has become even easier to work with in recent year, due to the abundance of Arm-based phones and laptops, just like the Arm CPU in the Mazda Infotainment.  The infotainment system was made by a company called Johnson Controls International, or JCI rather than being made in-house by Mazda. JCI left a lot of development and debugging features even in the final versions of the OS that went out to consumer cars. A Brief History of Hacking the M...

Tuning Your Car  I own a 2015 Mazda 3. It's far from the fastest car on the road, and after owning a modified Audi A4, and driving some other fun and fast cars, every time I go back to it it feels like a bit of a downgrade (save for the reliability!). After the reliability nightmare that my Audi was, I have very little interest in buying a car like that one any time soon despite how fun and fast it was, but wouldn't it be nice if my existing car was a bit speedier?  Enter the world of tuning. A car's tune is basically the software that controls the very low-level portions of the engine. It controls engine timing, air-fuel ratio, and much more. Most car manufacturers make a very safe default, or stock tune for their car. They don't optimize it for each and every single car that rolls off the production line, they make one safe tune and apply it to all of them.  This means that there's generally some room for performance gains on every single stock tune in any car. Ad...