[JasonACT]

I didn't just want to immediately say "No". But that's my answer. Even so, I had put this on my list of things to look at... I had previously gone to a lot of trouble to work out what Ford had done with these devices, they are locked down, Renesas do describe in detail how to secure their chips.. and from what I could see, there are no avenues to open them up.

The thing is, if you flash a bad image into the cluster, then for everyone's sake it's best to not "run" what got flashed - because doing so may crash the chip... Once it's crashed, you can't re-flash. The routines needed for doing so are no longer running.

You can't blame them.

In other news, I've managed to write some USB device drivers (I converted quite a few Linux USB drivers) for the MK2 touch screen. I've got the WiFi chip I'm using, which is connected to the "spare" HW serial port, working at ~250KB/s (or around 70KB/s with constant video decompression)... it's all a bit technical... But on a device plugged into the USB port it only runs at ~30KB/s. The difference is enough to make it not worth bothering too much with it. My application is a remote desktop to a raspberry pi running the Kodi media player.

Look at it this way, "remote desktop" has about 9 frames per second with a hacked-in device (smooth enough video, if you reduce the size to 25%, with a renderer that increases it back to full-screen) compared to less than 4 FPS with a non-modified unit with a USB WiFi dongle. FYI - they did use undocumented APIs for USB memory sticks which seems to work at 860KB/s, the internal flash chip runs at about 4MB/s while my SD card driver I made works at a little over 3MB/s.

But I think this thing is now "done". You either hack hardware into it to get something that works OK, otherwise it's not really ever going to be anything special. I'm a bit sad about that.