My application that won the competition

[chunkyks]

It's free and open source, called obdgpslogger. While you drive, it logs a lot of your engine parameters and your gps position, then lets you plot it out in google earth afterwards. There's also a CSV output right now, and I'm working on others [and more interesting number crunching]. There's a lot more info and background on the webpage, http://icculus.org/obdgpslogger

By way of example:

What you see there is a graph of where you were, how high the graph is is how fast you're going, and it's colored based on engine efficiency [eg, you can see the graph go red as I pull away from a stop, and green as I slow down to a traffic light].

I looked back, and I have posted one small component of it on these forums before, here; most OBDII dongles are FTDI chips, and the default globalscale sheevaplug didn't come with a working FTDI device, so I wrote a userland tool that proxies FTDI chips to a posix pty. [which lets you basically use it like you would if there was a real working ftdi_sio kernel module]. For bonus points, this also works in ubuntu 9.10, which has a pathologically broken ftdi_sio kernel module.


I'll gladly answer any questions about this stuff, it's been my little spare time project for almost a year, now. To head off what I can only assume will be the first few questions;

1) In the traditional unix way, obdgpslogger comes as a bunch of small command-line applications. You don't need a keyboard or display to actually log the trip, which is why it's so well suited to the sheevaplug.

2) Because of the design of the globalscale plug, it's easy to open up the device and replace the power supply with one more appropriate to your car.
The first guy to do this that I'm aware of logged the details on his site, here: http://paulfurtado.com/hacking-sheeva-power.php.
Someone else did it and took photos here: http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/worklogs/137079-connected-car-2.html#post1363722.
I will do it soon, now that I have a new ionics plug... But up to now, I've just been using the plug with a cheapie 110V cigarette lighter inverter.


You know what's funny is that I was going to post this on the "success stories" part of the forum when I saw the competition, and decided to enter instead :-)

Have fun,
Gary (-;

PS I'm generally avoiding talking about where the app is going in the future on the plug [there's some seriously cool stuff in the pipeline, hopefully], but the actual application that I won with is freely available as open source.

[rightonbro]

Gary, did you manage to log your trip back home from Vegas?  Would love to see what that looks like plotted out on Goog Earth!

[chunkyks]

I did! I have logs for both directions, although I haven't checked them yet. They're on a machine at home, so I will be plotting and looking at them tonight.

Oh, and I remember you & I talking about some stuff at the show. Here's a URL for you: http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

Gary (-;

[chunkyks]

Here we go:
http://icculus.org/obdgpslogger/examples/ces2010/

The google earth kml file is linked on that page, here:
http://icculus.org/obdgpslogger/examples/ces2010/ces2010.kml

Gary (-;

[rightonbro]

I loaded up your KML file into Goog Earth.  Dude, that is sweet!  You coasted down the El Cajon pass on your way back (thus there was no data) right?

And thanks, I will check out the OpenCV stuff!

[chunkyks]

Thank-you for the compliment :-D

If the GPS receiver isn't seeing the sky, then there's nothing to log; it can't guess your position, so nothing appears in google earth [although the OBDII data is logged anyways, usually]

If you wanted to poke at the actual data, the sqlite3 database [aka logfile] is there. You're welcome to just download it from that page, or I've converted it to CSV for download there, too [there's an obd2csv tool in the obdgpslogger downloads]

Gary (-;

[tripzero]

Very nice.  Looks like you were doing a bit of speeding about 80% of the way to Las vegas. 

[chunkyks]

Check the numbers. I think you'll find I was speeding all the way there and all the way back. The drop in fuel efficiency you saw was the steep[ish] uphill climb to 6k feet or so

I calculated how many miles per gallon I did on the last tank [the stop I made outside vegas on the way back home was a fillup]. I got back to LA, then drove to San Diego and back. Anyways; 33mpg. A new record for me, over the entire tank.

Gary (-;

[joosty]

Wondering if you had any thoughts about this OBD Bluetooth dongle: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.16921 ? It looks interesting mainly because of its small size. Having some doubts if it'll work as good as the ones you mention on your OBD GPS site.

[chunkyks]

I suspect it'll work - as a whole, anything that pretends to be "ELM327" and provide a decent serial-type interface should be good to go. I've heard

I do personally recommend going with any of the premium brands; obdpro, scantool.net, or obdkey are the three that I have personal, positive, experience with. I haven't tried much in the way of cheaper ones personally.

For bluetooth dongles, you use rfcomm to get the job done. Once you get everything set up right, it's as simple as telling obdgpslogger to use /dev/rfcomm0 as the serial device [or whatever you set up], and it should automatically connect when obdgpslogger tries to open the device.

Part of the question for bluetooth and the plugcomputer is how to trigger launching obdgpslogger; when I have USB devices, linux udev triggers the launch. When you have bluetooth, you'll want to use SysV init to launch obdgpslogger once you hit runlevel 3 [on the plug] [unless you have a keyboard or something]

I'm very interested to hear how it works out!

Gary (-;