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You can find similar products that work over bluetooth for under $10 on Amazon. I use an old smartphone on a mount to show all of the same information using a third-party app - no need for an $88 proprietary dongle.

There doesn't seem to be anything new about this product other than marketing and a high price tag. I'd love for that to not be the case, however. Maybe I'm missing some features of it.

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From the README[0]:

It supports 3x CAN, 2x LIN, and 1x GMLAN. It also charges a phone. On the computer side, it has both USB and Wi-Fi.

It uses an STM32F413 for low level stuff and an ESP8266 for Wi-Fi. They are connected over high speed SPI, so the panda is actually capable of dumping the full contents of the busses over Wi-Fi, unlike every other dongle on amazon. ELM327 is weak, panda is strong.

https://github.com/commaai/panda/blob/master/README.md

Interesting. Seems to be more of an enthusiast data-focused product rather than something aimed towards traditional car-folk then. Might be interesting to play around with even if you don't want to contribute the data back to comma.ai

From the article comments:

>George Hotz:

None of the < $100 ones can dump all the data, they don't have the bandwidth. Or be reliable enough to send a packet at 100hz for hours without dropping any. Trust me, I wouldn't be building hardware if I didn't have to.

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