Yet another newbie, diving into some technical stuff!

welcome!

you want tech stream, and yes, it does everything.

the service manual is at techinfo.toyota.com $20. for 2 days iirc.

all the best!

 

Welcome aboard... What part of the US are you in?

You got an amazing price on your car and replacing with a used accumulator from a wrecking yard will give you a great opportunity to look for hidden damage from the car being totaled.

And make the most of learning the repair because those darn warning lights on Prius show up with the usual type of ordinary mods you do on other cars, so you won't get many things to tweak. Even just putting in new seats could be a problem as relates to air bag compatibility. You'd think Toyota & Lexus could make the same signals/airbags for all seats, but they rarely do.

 

There have been attempts, but I don’t know of anyone who has done so. People with the ability to reverse-engineer the software in the power management control ECU have many other, more remunerative outlets for their talents, and relative to the time and effort required, I’m not sure the results would be all that interesting.

If you’re interested in the car’s technology, be sure to look at the New Car Features book (more info) and Toyota’s technical training course books.

 

The black arts and deep web are not so friendly places where that type of info circulates. Not something most here at PC would be privy too. But think about it, if torque prius dr hybrid assistant and carista have plunged into the prius can bus, just imagine what is going on behind the scenes.
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plus Toyota has open sourced most if not all prius patent info for others to copy and use royalty free.
A bold move by Toyota, and a move that I personally hope will benefit both Toyota and everyone else that looks for a better future for the human race.

And is in stark contrast to how Honda handles their proprietary hybid programming.

There are a couple of threads here at PC where individuals have have retrofitted other Toyota models with the prius HDS (hybrid drive system), Although mostly as a hobby so far.

For Tesla's on the other hand has at least one youtube channel devoted specifically to reverse engineering the model S

 

It’s one thing to watch the interaction between a Toyota Techstream diagnostic system and the vehicle, and then write another program to do the same thing, or to figure out a few CAN bus messages, and quite another to understand the ECU software well enough to modify it, or even just to find out the malfunction thresholds that have been omitted from the Repair Manual as “TMC’s intellectual property,” i.e., trade secrets of Toyota.

The ones I’ve seen have involved installing a complete hybrid system into another body, so the hybrid vehicle software can run unmodified. I haven’t seen any reports of a Li-ion battery or MGR from a fourth-generation Prius, for example, working in an earlier model, or of other mix-and-match combinations that the existing software from Toyota wouldn’t be able to operate.

If you read Toyota’s offer, it’s a fairly vague commitment: manufacturers can contact Toyota to negotiate the details. I haven‘t seen a published list of patents or offer of specific licensing terms, which could well include conditions—especially for licensees not interested in Toyota’s “fee-based technical support”—that would make the license commercially unattractive.

Regardless of their availability for licensing, patents have always been published, but in automobiles, as in most fields, there is a wide gulf between the disclosures in the patent literature and the know-how needed to design and manufacture a commercially viable product. Once a firm has enough patents to deter competitors and secure favorable cross-licensing terms, they have few reasons to reveal more of their hard-earned knowledge.

 

If you are mechanically inclined, you can do the accumulator repair yourself. There are quite a few youtube Prius brake accumulator replacement video's.

As far as the back-up beeping, I found that very distracting. I don't know why a car needs to sound like a fork-lift while backing. I installed a Scan Gauge in my car and there is an X-gauge code that can be entered to switch the back-up beeper to a single beep when the shifter is moved to reverse.

I believe that there are 16 different processors/controllers in this car that all interact so modding that keeps them all happy is going to be a daunting task.

Keep us informed how things are going.

 

@Elektroingenieur you are so right on all accounts. It's not a perfect world and as advances are made in technology and money changes hands the laws that we live under continue to change adjust. Open source is not the same animal it was just 5 years ago. Now almost every business on the planet has at least a small stake in open source somewhere. And even corporations that used to be Violently opposed to anything open sourced or free software are now pumping billions into the development processes.
Patents are another issue with a lot of flawed concepts. Some like to call it a racquette others like to horde whatever they can get their hands on. The most aggressive business techniques of the past several decades are usually no longer talked about much to the general public, it doesn't mean that they are not still being implemented and discussed in the boardrooms. My favorite being the Hedge Fund Manager. If being an average broker on the street, looking at the very best of the hedgefund managers, would I be trying to lean their techniques before the hedgefund ride reaches the end run. or the end of it's run.

I'm pretty sure Toyota s technical abilities are far beyond current Prime offerings in what we used to call the Green Sciences. And this is where Tesla s main problem (or at least one of the big ones in my opinion ) lies. Releasing new technologies that other greedy unscrupulous players in the field / market can attempt to discredit and / or obtain.
While Toyota on the other hand still offers the huge guzzling gassers (you can quote me on that one) to the market that is paying for them, just like almost every other auto manufacturer on the planet..

 

My favorite example of open source was back in the days of Napster and MP3 players just as the iPod hit the market Archos open sourced their firmware and so many people modfied it that you had endless special effects to improve sound quality, tons of games were added and their were new optimization updates almost every day so the firmware kept running faster and faster. There was a sense of a greater activist community working on Archos products back then...

Meanwhile the Library of congress in late 2000's advised that products weren't published works with copy rights that couldn't be modified, but electronics industry kept pushing back and made it harder and harder to repair of modify.

Then push came to shove with farmers. Tractor and heavy equipment makers wouldn't allow farmers to repair their own equipment, which often meant spending thousands of dollars just to haul your combine to the company for repairs and when you have a harvest window of just a handful of days, a breakdown in your equipment could bankrupt you if you can't make repairs yourself as quickly as possible. The farmers are starting to win this battle, despite incompetent leadership in congress...

Additionaly, Apple was finally pressured enough to drop it's new system that would of prevented 3rd party businesses from replacing components in their products...

The roots of all this evil is the same root of most all evil all over the world, which is capitalism... Society is held back in so many ways when we don't protect a collaborative market place and allow companies to exclusify and monopolize. The most egregious example to this day is destroying the whole planet with Fossil Fuel pollution:

"When new, this 1918 Detroit Electric Model 75 Brougham relied on two banks of 42 lead-acid cells, 21 in the front and 21 in the rear, to supply power to its series-wound 4.28 horsepower DC motor. The original batteries were hard rubber cases that held lead plates and acid and were stacked in wooden trays. The electric motor was mounted beneath the floor, and its armature shaft connected by universal joints to a conventional differential. There was no transmission or clutch to wear out.

The operator controlled the car with three pedals, a steering tiller and a control lever to manage its speed. The left pedal applied the parking brakes and cut out power to the motor, the right pedal operated the brakes and the third pedal reversed the polarity, allowing the car to back up." https://www.hemmings.com/blog/article/1918-detroit-electric/

 

Yes, they can smell !
Just like any car that has had a quart of milk spilled on the Car Pet. Taking every piece of the car apart, cleaning and deodorizing, scraping smelly or other unusable parts is essential.

Driving a rebuild is an animal unto itself.
There is legislation in the works to make it illegal to do ones own repairs on their fully owned cars. I'd hate to not be able to get parts for my aging vehicles, just like you mentioned above.
Being at the mercy of the "automotive mechanic" can be either a dream come true or a total nightmare.

How many car owners do you know that verify that the work being billed is actually performed on their cars.