In this presentation from the recent Toorcon 15 in San Diego, CA, Jared Boone, co-developer of the HackRF SDR detailed his efforts in reversing tire pressure monitors found on most vehicles.
Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) are present on all US automobiles sold as of 2008. This talk, given at ToorCon 15 in San Diego, discusses how to receive and decode radio transmissions from TPMS devices, using an inexpensive software-defined radio, GNU Radio, and software published on GitHub.
Does anyone know whether there are radio receiver chips from common manufacturers that can receive on the TPMS frequencies? What about any other standard chips for TPMS?
The video explains that there are no industry standards, although a few details seem to be common. With Microchip and other companies focusing on CAN and other automotive technologies these days, it seems like there might be some chips available to simplify building a TPMS receiver (or transmitter).
I realize that the SDR solution is only $20, but I can’t help but think that a purpose-built receiver could integrate the filtering, demodulation, FSK, and other processing to deliver a much lower bandwidth data stream without requiring a full laptop for decoding.
I’ll probably just look for other wireless FSK decoder circuits and tweak the values to adjust for TPMS. It would be nice if we could get a TPMS receiver PCB here on DP.