Piston vs smartmontools

Piston is an Android app that turns a phone into a scanner for vehicle diagnostics. It works with OBD-II and EOBD vehicles through a separate ELM327 adapter connected by Bluetooth or WiFi. The free plan costs nothing and includes reading and clearing diagnostic trouble codes, viewing Freeze Frame data, and reading real-time sensor data. Access is limited to information the vehicle provides through OBD2. Premium adds sensor charts, CSV export, Readiness Monitors, fault history, cloud sync, and VIN reading. Some older vehicles may not support VIN readout. Piston uses Firebase services for crash reporting, monitoring, analytics, authentication, remote configuration, and cloud storage. Settings provide opt-outs for several data services, and account deletion permanently removes associated data.

smartmontools is a free package containing smartctl and smartd for controlling and monitoring storage devices through SMART. It supports ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS, and NVMe disks, as well as SCSI/SAS tape devices. smartctl can report SMART health status, show capabilities such as error logging and offline surface scanning, display vendor-specific attributes, start device self-tests, and read their logs. A failing health status can mean a device has failed or predicts failure within 24 hours. smartd periodically monitors SMART status, error and self-test logs, and attribute changes; it can schedule tests and report errors and attribute changes to syslog. It also supports warning emails and executable commands. The project says it should run on modern Linux, BSD variants, macOS, Solaris, Windows, Cygwin, OS/2, eComStation, and QNX systems, and can run from various Live CDs and DVDs. The package uses the GNU GPL Version 2 license and was originally derived from the Linux smartsuite package. Its capabilities focus on SMART health reporting, testing, and ongoing monitoring.