RomRaider

Hi All,

I am pretty new to romraider, so apologies if this is the wrong place for this kind of post.

Anyways.. romraider is cool (obviously). And fast polling seems to be the good oil. Much better than your run-of-the-mill OBDII logging system.

So.. to cut a long story short, I want an iPhone (or Android) dashboard that works while I am logging. The basic idea is that my little romraider netbook sits in my glovebox and uses an ad-hoc wifi to send/provide data to a dashboard app on the iphone/android device.

I am a java programmer, and have done some iOS work, so want to give this idea a try. I had a 10 minute look at the romraider src and its looks like it would be quite "easy" to plug in a new data handler.

Before I dive in, I was wondering..

(1) Has anyone else tried something like this ? I tried to search, but just got swamped with stuff of people trying to port romraider itself to these devices

(2) Will these be any issues with a new handler that has network latency to deal with screwing with the core romraider data collection ?

Cheers

Alex

You're the first I've seen mention getting the data to iOS via a laptop in the middle. If you get it working I have a dev account and wouldn't mind "testing" on an iPAD.

I can't see any problem with writing another handler to pump the data collected to a network stream (Bluetooth or Wifi). All the heavy lifting will be on the display end.

So I did a proof of concept, and it worked nicely.

I just added a new handler that acts as a server and basically pushes the same data that the filehandler would write to disk to any accepted clients (it pushes the header line upon connection).

My main reason for wanting this app was for track days, so I was thinking about what kinds of "intelligent" information I could display in addition to displaying raw values. Things like Boost spike/Over-boost warning, Knock light etc.

I also plan on adding a GPS based lap timer.

Anyone have any ideas of fun things I could try ?

I also spent a bit of time working on the replay code that was started in the eculogger. Its not perfect yet, but was handy for testing my client app outside the car.

I would want to be able to select any parameter and be able to pick through various types of gauges (light, digital gauge, analog dial gauge, analog "bar graph" style gauge, etc...). It would also be cool to be able to set warnings or warning ranges for each parameter. You could then have beeps at different frequencies based on the value in the range (higher frequency beeps for more degrees of timing pulled, or for every psi you overboost, etc...).

Graphing functionality would also be cool. You could select graphing, select the parameters, select the axis values and axis scalings, and then have it graph automatically when throttle opening angle is 100%.

Also the novelty of a dyno, 0-60, 0-100, 1/4 mile would be nice. You could combine the ecu, gps, and the accelerometer data for more accuracy.

Which platform did you develop your proof of concept for?

I like the idea of audio output.. And because I use wifi to talk to romraider, I guess the phone could still use bluetooth to output audio to the car.

But yeah.. your wish-list is pretty similar to what I thought it would look like. (Might be a fair bit of work to get that level of customisation)

I have a 3G Subaru and wanted to have an intelligent knock light that draws on all of the knock entries and the other relevant data (engine load, if a power-shift has just occurred etc) to try and filter out the non-critical knock data. I am still learning about the ECU and was looking for other things like this that I could create "intelligent" gauges for.

I have an AEM wideband and was also thinking of being able to detect if the target AFRs were not being hit, but that seems like it could be easier said than done.

As I am not a tuner, I don't really know what (if any) of these kinds of things would be useful for road-tuning. I am thinking more of warnings for track-day type car abuse.

Graphing would be nice, I guess we could do a road-dyno also.

I did the client app on an iphone (it's the phone I have).

Had another idea.. Looked at the iphone doco and I think it should be possible. Only risk would be the frame rate might be poor.

Basically record video out the front window, and then overlay gauges onto the video stream. The data should be reasonably well time synced.

I will refrain from hating on apple products and just simply request that you do this project for android. I just feel that it would be the optimal choice for the community considering there are more devices, and the platform is much more friendly to develop for. I would be willing to donate an old g1 for the cause, or possibly a samsung galaxy S.

If you can't hate on apple on an open source java project's development forum, then when can you hate ?

I would ideally do versions for both platforms. I assume there is a decent android emulator available.

I just wonder how many people could really be bothered to hook up a laptop to their tactrix cable, set up network between their phone etc just to get a dashboard display. Would be a shame to write an android app if no-one used it.

At least I know I will use the iphone app

After testing my proof on concept for a few days it is way ahead of the only other thing I tried which was a kiwi-wifi + an app called "Rev".

The Rev app is very nice, but the data rates and reliability of the kiwi-wifi + iphone is pretty ordinary (As well as being restricted to OBD-II logger data.

Very nice. I did some tests with an app that used the phone as an external display. It worked OK, but could be much better.

I think it's a great thing, having the phone in a windshield mount as a HUD would be 100% badass.

I have been looking at getting an android tablet with road logging as one of the reasons. The netbook works but isn't ideal. I am android stupid right now as I haven't had much seat time with an android device. Is this the only way to get Romraider on an adroid? Do tablets not allow USB input from the tactrix? Will the software even run on an android (either win or linix)?

You should read through this thread as it deals with all the same issues, just for a different OS.

So I actually got a prototype of this working quite a few months back.

I modified romraider logger so that it has a little TCP server that listens for connections then spits out the logger data to any connected clients that are listening. I used the bonjour protocol to advertise itself.

I then wrote a simple iphone app that connects to the first romraider server that it finds using bonjour and displays the log data in a simple text based dashboard or allows you to record video and overlays the logged data into the video stream.

I kinda cooled off on this plan after testing it out at the track for a few reasons. Firstly there was too much manual setup getting the iphone connected to the laptop (or visa-versa), running romraider, making sure it logged etc. (Not to mention my software being a bit flakey).

Secondly, I found I was wanting to run lap timer software on the iphone rather than my dashboard, and was using openport standalone logging rather than having a laptop.

I am happy to post the sourcecode if anyone is interested (romraider mods and iphone app), however the iphone app doesn't really have much valuable code in there (apart from maybe the video overlay code). It uses a few hard coded test logger parameters which romraider needs to have set up independently etc and really just reads the data and writes the text to the screen.

I am now considering trying to get an arduino talking SSM via CAN to achieve a similar purpose.

I'd be interested in the mods you made for the RomRaider server portion. If you don't mind posting them.

Sure - whats the best way to do it ? I made the changes against the trunk at the time which was 362. I can give you a diff or just post up the whole modified project.

From memory I started hacking the playback stuff too, but found that it was harder than it first seemed In the end I did a hack to get playback working for my testing.