RomRaider

Hey guys,

I thought it was about time I shared what I've been up to with you guys.

for about the last 6 months to a year I've been working on an Arduino based "SSM" gauge for my 2011 WRX. I was inspired by the apex Spec C, in fact I'd have bought it if it would have fit in my car!

Basically what I want to do is move the existing clock pod down to near the cigarette lighter, and in it's place put 3 128by128 RGB oLEDs.

I've got Arduiino code hacked together that works - it needs to be heavily optimised however.

Here is me showing off what I've got it doing with a serial LCD. I tried to adapt this code to 3 freetronics oLeds but it shat its pants - i think i need more RAM, and a faster CPU.

I'm going to port this to a Teensy3.0 and try with the oLeds.

I've also since stripped back the code, now have it reading an ini file from an SD card (rather than using a hardcoded PROGMEM table with all the parameter addresses etc).

And I've been chatting with nelsmar, who is working on something similar for his supercharged BRZ.

So we figured if we combined efforts and came up with a common platform (given the majority of the base code will be the same) we could open source it and help others out.

Heres a video of it in action with an LCD....

Would love to see who'd be keen to jump in and help out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99A1ilcjUQ

that's nice.

I was wanting to do something like this with an arduino. I'm not as good as you though.

My clock pod is empty, well it had a broken clock rattling around in it but I took it out.

Do you think you could share your code? I understand if you wanna keep it under wraps but it would help me immensely.

Very nice. I am a noob as far as electronics go but I have found the teensy to be great on the projects that I used them on. The guys on that board really are quite brilliant. I am doing something similar but I have a steep learning curve ahead of me. I want to use the obdII data to determine when an intercooler sprayer comes on. Yes a switch would be easier but I like the challenge of learning new things.

You may want to look at the teensy2 as it is 5v while the teensy3 is 3.3. I believe the car/obd signals are 5v so you will have to deal with that if you go with the t3.

Have you considered using a raspberry pi and plug it into your nav/radio screen? Just a thought as there is an obd library for the raspberry pi.

Good luck and keep us posted on your progress.

Paul

Have you made any progress? I've been trying to make a simpler version- yours looks very impressive.

http://www.clubwrx.net/forums/tutorials ... duino.html

hehe not bad (from the creator of the Apex Spec C)

I had not seen the Apex Spec C... wow. That needs more exposure- it appears to be very helpful!

Might as well post this here, Seems like we've got a few techies all hanging out in one spot so why not.

During my time at university I was with our local FSAE chapter. Took me 5.5 years for a BS in both ME and EE so I had a while on the team. We were small but had a somewhat decent budget so combining those two you get a few guys doing a LOT of work (seriously we build the '11 car with 3 guys). Anyway, I was our electrical/Daq/engine/drivetrain/tires guy and a lot of our stuff was made in house. I worked with some pretty awesome hardware, MoTec Pectel, Aim, and custom stuff as well. Fit lin-pots, steering pots, tire temps, coolant analysis, you name it I probably did it.

Now I'm not rattling all of this off to toot my own horn, I'm throwing it out there to give you a little background before ya'll say I'm crazy

Now quite obviously I can't (rather wouldn't want to) spend upwards of $2k USD to outfit my DD with a data logging solution for rallyX. There were a few other options in market but I wasn't quite satisfied. So I said to hell with it and I'm making my own logger. Basically takes what you guys have going on and expanding on it.

Specs:

uC
Rev1 will be a Arduino. Again the reason why I posted in here to hopefully leech some code if needed :p
Rev2 will be an M0 ARM processor. I've got a dev board from my time with a previous employer and this would make the unit quite stout.

Inputs
-OBD/CAN/RS inputs configurable per the users needs
-6 A/D inputs with full scale low and high voltage protection. 0-5V input but 12V tollerant
-GPS input from external sensor

Additional sensors
-3-axis accelerometer
-Yaw sensor

Now this is where it gets fun. All the above information will be stored via USB for later logging an analysis. However at the same time I've got the wild hare idea to interface the uC with a Raspberry Pi (rPi) for real time display of information. From looking around it seems like the serial coms are quick enough to transfer data to the rPi without significant lag. This will of course be test and check and would liely be best suited for values that are not rapidly changing, IE temps, pressures, etc. However the gameplan is to use the touchscreen driven by the rPi as a way to configure you logging status real time.

I'll eventually start my own thread with more details, and process but I wanted to drop a line here first to hopefully scoop up some resources!

This looks like a good plan; I'm quite interested to see how it comes together (so please post about it as you get it worked out). Mine has been a fun project, and it's exciting to see others do similar work!

I wonder if you could tell us about your FSAE work. Did you have to design an engine management solution? i.e. read crank and throttle position, airflow, etc. and adjust fueling and spark timing based upon real time sensor data? Making some kind of hobby/go-cart engine with my own designed ECU/engine programming is on my bucket list.

What can't I tell you

We never designed our own ECU, we left that to the fine folks at MoTec. I did however end up making our own driver module. Solid state FET's were controlled to turn various parameters on an off (fans, fuel pump, etc). Second iteration included integration into a display on the steering wheel for RPM, gear, and the OH s*** light.

I did however do quite a bit of work with a custom ECU of sorts during my capstone project. We were working on developing a servo-motor controlled air-driven valvetrain. Piggyback ECU would take its inputs from the crank sensor, tps and MAP sensors and change the valve timing to reflect the engines needs. Low RPM promoted a short duration for more torque whereas the high RPM range promoted a longer duration for better breathing and more HP. Floating valves while starting and some other fun parameters were also implemented.

I just recently got my OBDII plug so hopefully I'll start having fun with it. I'm also in the middle of getting a tune put together for my car but it should see some attention soon.

Hi guys,

Since having a kid I haven't had a great deal of time to play with taking it further, however I am just trying to find a decent screen to fit in the spot available.

Mart - you should open source your work, or keep developing it and give us G3 guys a clock pod option!

I intend to get back on the tools in a few months when some other projects clear off my plate...

well I had 2 kids in the process of making it as well.... the code is pretty hectic.... however, I moved to the evo platform since... so I did an Apex for my evo about about a year ago using full CAN capabilities



Mart

DARK SIDER!!!

Mart just out of curiosity what uC are you running for the Apex? I'm being really lazy and just starting this in the arduino before getting into it too much. I've got an Arm Cortex M0 laying around that will eventually get duty on this but its more of a PITA to get set-up how you want. Super powerful and lower overhead, just longer set-up. It's been a few years since I've been intimate with that platform so I'm going to hold off just a bit :p

In other news (again since I'm lazy) my CAN-TTL plug came last week but I've been tuning so....hopefully this week/weekend I'll get some progress made

EDIT:

Got my little 3" touch-screen last night hooked up and functioning. Its displaying single values on the screen now! Also my partner in crime ordered his rPi and we're actually going a bit of a different route with this.

I did some research and its actually quite easy to use a level shifter to get the GPIO ports on the rPi to talk with ADC chips. We're thinking about using the rPi exclusively now. Ya know, 700Mhz processor, L2 cache and lots of other goodies. I think also just to make it a bit more universal we'll make all of the inputs analog or digital and just use the ADC chips. If you program the port to be "digital" then it'll just go through a little bit of post-processing before display/storage. I also think this would be more appealing to some as I know I've had issue before where "God i wish i had ONE more analog port" (with 5 digitals left over).

Hopefully some more progress soon!

Hey guys

I have a teensy 3.1, and oled display and some LED's I'd like to put together in some form to monitor things in my 05 Legacy GT. This is my first time doing anything like this, so I'll be following along here.
Dumb question perhaps, but it seems that our cars were not can-bus equipped until 2007. Is this accurate? The reason I ask is that the Teensy 3.1 has built-in support for CAN.

The 05+ have CAN, just no CAN support for logging and flashing. So you can listen to CAN messages and pick up most of what you need. You will have to tap directly into the CAN bus though as it's not wired to the OBD plug.

I see. Thanks for the quick response - I guess I'll just wire into the k-line using the buffer shown here
So I'm trying to construct my serial command; does what I have make sense? (I'm doing this in python because that's what I'm comfortable with - I'll hard code the command into the teensy when I get it how I like it). I'm particularly uncertain about the knocksum address, data size byte and checksum.


toserial output hex:int