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Saturday was move day and the transition went very smoothly.  We had Matt and Catherine Trumbo, Kaaren and Raymond McIsaac, Sean Rees, and a sick-but-helping-in-spirit Mary Phillips to help us move the big stuff.  It took 2.5 hours from start to done.  We then sat around chatting, eating pizza and drinking homebrew.  I made up an Irish Red just for the occasion, dubbed “The Crew Brew.” The first couple bottles were a little harsh, but they sat for another few days before the move and have since mellowed out into a very pleasant beer.

This week has been spent frantically getting prepared for our trip to Ireland.  Kim has been the travel agent for Sean and I on this one. In addition to being a Rockstar mover the entire week leading up to move day, she has also been booking accomodations, tours, and various forms of travel necessary for the trip.  Her free time from the unfortunate layoff of was truly a blessing in disguise.

Speaking of work, Kim has a third, and hopefully final, interview this Thursday.  The position is for an engineering project assistant similar to what she has been doing in the last two positions. It sounds right up her alley.  Send good thoughts her way Thursday morning.

My work has been going very well, I’m really growing professionally.  I think a lot of that has to do with the stellar team I happen to be working with.  I feel quite lucky to be part of this awesome group, both personally and technically. If you’re reading this and you’re part of that group, don’t let it go to your head. Otherwise, know the Pelco CDL rocks!

Nearly 3 months ago I was given one of these by Sean.  I spent some time doing proof of concept work with it, but the living situation necessitated stealing the wife’s laptop and sitting in the hot car without internet access.  Due in part to the unpleasantness of the work environment and a major move, new job, etc… this fell by the wayside for a bit.  I have resumed work (and re-learned some things) this weekend with a much better working environment (read garage with work bench).  So without further adieu here is what I now know about the OBD-II portion of the carputer.

OBD-II comes in many flavors, my 2001 Honda Accord comes in the ISO 9141-2 flavor favored by Asian car manufacturers.  The scantool I have is using an ELM 323 IC for converting ISO 9141 to ASCII transported via RS-232 then further translated to a USB connection using an FTDI FT232R RS-232 to USB IC.  Forgive the detail here, but this is more for my own records than anything.  With the appropriate driver from FTDI I get handy little tty device that I can connect to.

After much investigation and new knowledge acquisition I was able to use the handy program ‘cu‘ to connect to my scantool with the command

cu -s 9600 -o -l /dev/ttyUSB0

Using the handy dandy list from wikipedia I was able to get some information out of my ECU.  Unfortunately, not as much as I had hoped. Below is the most relevant.

>0100
41 00 BE 3E B8 10

This shows me what data is available from the ECU. 41 01 is a header telling me what mode I am in.  The remaining four bytes then tell me what PIDs our available.

BE 3E B8 10 = 1011-1110 0011-1110 1011-1000 0001-0000

Which means I only have PIDs 01, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 0B, 0C, 0D, 0E, 0F, 11, 13, 14, and 15. So of a theoretical 96 (though more common 64) I have 15 PIDs supported, which is a little disappointing. I can’t get some of the fun data I otherwise could have. Maybe I should get a new ECU…

Next step for OBD-II is interacting with the terminal in code.  I found this great tutorial that will make that a piece of cake.

That’s it for now.  Next up is my Fusion Brain. This has all kinds of possibilities.

I have a vision for the Hondat (our 2001 Honda Accord, yes I know, original name). I see a GPS guidance system, voice activated environmental controls, and engine stats. I see digital maintenance logs, gigabytes of media, and integrated hands-free over bluetooth. I see…a carputer.

I am starting down the long (and potentially expensive) path of designing, installing, and implementing a custom carputer.  I plan on using this blog not only to share my adventures, but to help organize all my ideas.  Thus begins the feature list:

• 7″ Touchscreen interface
• Additional 4.5″ LCD monitor
• Micro-ATX form factor for the computer
• Bluetooth
• GPS integration
• Media player (mp3, mpeg, jpeg, etc…)
• Engine stats via OBDII
• Engine diagnostics
• Maintenance Log with reminders
• Digital Environmental Controls
• Voice activated controls
• Trip logs

All this will be integrated into one slick interface.

Other low-priority possibilities include:

• Door lock and trunk control
• Bluetooth auto-unlocking from phone application
• Window control
• External sensors (ie. weather sensors, IR, tire pressure, etc…)
• External Cameras, automatically engaged with reverse
• Wifi
• Car Alarm
• Customized profiles based on driver with some sort of auto recognition (keyed fobs, voice recognition, something…)

I know there is software already out there that does all of this, but I’m looking at this as a learning tool and an exciting hobby.  I plan on using quite a bit of third party components, but I want to integrate them all myself.  I plan on this all being based off of a Linux OS.  Probably something like LFS so I am aware of every package installed on the system.

So here is the first draft of my carputer requirements.  I will most likely be editing this page as new ideas pop into my head, or initial ideas are refined.  I will also be using the tag system to expand on my adventures with each feature.  OBDII will be first up on that list, since I already have an OBDII to USB connector, compliments of Sean (thanks for the birthday present!).