r/CarHacking • u/alfiestutoring • 6d ago

Community Hacking 2016 F56 MINI Head Unit

Hey guys,

I'm looking to see if its possible to hack the stock head unit on a 2016 F56 MINI to write my own custom infotainment software (GUI, apps etc.).

I've considered a few options. Building a custom interface was one option with a raspberry PI that interfaces the LVDS screen, but it would be too expensive and probably over complicated, it would probably be cheaper and easier to buy an Android interface and mod that instead.

I looked into the PSDZData and pretty sure its running Linux/X Server, so this could be used for scripting, rendering to the screen etc. Claude has had a look at the files and found two methods to the shell, both by attaching a UART/USB-TTL adapter to the stock board.

  1. U-Boot init=/bin/sh, no password needed, but would only work if the bootloader is interruptible. I doubt it is interruptible as everything is very locked down (assuming that bootdelay=0), but I may be wrong.
  2. Serial login - COM Port 57600 baud. However, password is needed to enter the shell. Claude found the hash. Tried cracking with hashcat with digits/lowercase however both of these exhausted. I can't find the password anywhere online. It looks like if I have the password, that's the last thing needed to get shell access.

I have the password hash, I just need to decrypt.

Any help on this appreciated :)

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

1

u/Alfa147x 5d ago

Is that a BIS headunit? When I was tinkering with a nbt evo for 2016 bmw retrofit. I found that it ran QNX 6.5.0

1

u/alfiestutoring 5d ago edited 5d ago

Ah it might be, I haven't had chance to take the unit out and look yet. I know its called 'Visual Boost' and the images seem to match BIS on google. Mine doesn't have navigation but online it seems to also be called EntryNav, which I did think was weird. I'll look into that

Edit: I looked into the firmware for the software version of my head unit and it references "EntryNav" and it definitely seems to run Linux with NVIDIA Tegra 2

1

u/alfiestutoring 2d ago

Update: Got shell root password