Please excuse me should this sound like any sort of demand, I just had an idea I was hoping to get feedback and gauge interest on.

What do you think of an opensource handheld flasher that would provide essentially the functionality of APR/GIAC/etc. ODB 'tune' selectors?  It would need help from a lot of different people but my initial thought would be to base it around an existing raspberry pi/beaglebone development environment.  Is anyone currently developing software that might lend itself to this function, run on linux?

Thoughts?
Thanks

btw it would be nice if it included some basic checksumming support...

I suppose that would work utilizing Bluetooth but you'd absolutely need some checksumming capability in that case.  Not that you wouldn't want it if you could.

I was thinking storage on a microSD card with usb connectivity with a 7-segment type basic text display and a couple buttons.  Much like your average odb scanner.  Interfacing with the applications we currently use via GUI or commandline would take some scripting due to the limited interface.

Even better would be if this tool could include an FTDI chip and function as a standard scan tool/flasher with PC connectivity.

I'm all in, although I don't have a smartphone... I don't believe in that crap

It'd certainly be nice just to have something like Nefmoto being open source so we could integrate support for new ecus as well as ME7.

Just to clarify my original idea, not that new ideas aren't appreciated, I think an embedded solution might be the best approach versus a iphone/android 'app' because of the amount of development involved in that approach.  Besides the amount of fracturing in the android ecosystem between versions of android and countless phones so there would have to be near from scratch development of android/ios software for this purpose, a second interface would need to be developed either USB/Bluetooth so the phone could access the ECU.

An embedded microcontroller/nanoPC solution using beaglebone or Rasberry Pi might be able to run any existing Linux compatible tools with little/no modification.  An interface to ODB would need to be developed though this should be minimal as both these previously mentioned  platforms support GPIO and flashing the ECU is largely a serial communication via the K line.  So that would require little development.  The end result I'm hoping would be a 100 to 150 dollar unit that you could keep in your glovebox and swap between tunes on the go.  This is a great community but lets face it there aren't a lot of contributing devs out there so keeping overhead low would be essential to accomplishing this goal.  Once that task is completed there's room for added features like maybe DTC logging/clearing and maybe loading a bin file via USBOTG so you could retrieve a flash via email or the web and get it on your car in a pinch using a phone.

I believe these are for sale, this has potential but is lacking in at least two ways we'd find useful.  There's no User I/O, buttons or native display and it'd be nice to embed an FT232 chip for doubling as an on the fly programmable OBD scan tool.

http://arduinodev.com/hardware/

Also for an 'embedded' solution it's fairly expensive however that's due to 'off the shelf' solutions utilized by the product, arduino base and bluetooth package.

Woah that's impressive, i'm just cautious of these 'cheap' bluetooth dongles considering how crucial the task though simple it may.  In this case you may want to look into that OBD tool linked above, as it's open you'd have more access to things you may need though I have no idea what that'd be.

I know BBB and RBPi will run Python, not certain how that is implemented but search either with 'python' and you'll find loads of results.  Even a book on learning python with the RBPi