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Reading ODBII data. Homemade scanner/tuner.

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Old Nov 16, 2006 | 09:23 AM
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Default Reading OBDII data. Homemade scanner/tuner.

So has anyone ever pondered the thought of creating there own OBDII interface? I have been doing some reading and will be ordering some chips to play around with. It would be nice to have a open source scanner tool and possibly some tuning capabilities.

Any electronics/software engineers around? I write code by day and do cars by night and have a very electronics savy friend here at work. So we are going to start playing around with some of this and see what we can come up with.

This is where I started: http://www.akmcables.com/obdii.htm

I think we are going to start w/ this: ELM327QS

Any ideas?

Last edited by stealth71; Nov 16, 2006 at 10:46 AM.
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Old Nov 16, 2006 | 09:37 AM
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All you really need is a cable that will download, and flash properly to the ECU, however, with the tools that are already out there on the market, HP Tuners, EFI Live, and then the piggy back stuff such as megasquirt, there really isn't much need.

Subaru and EVO guys are having development issues with open source stuff (it's been going on for a few years now and is just about to the point of being user friendly with GUI interfaces and live tuning and factory ECU wideband support).

HPT already gets that too you for, what I and most, think is a reasonable price. Not only that...that's their full time gig (or close to it) and there's factory support, where as open source if it gets done, it gets done, if ever.
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Old Nov 16, 2006 | 09:45 AM
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Also, if your going to go real open source, you will want to use the J2534 (i think?) specs out there, so any hardware can be used.

I can tell you first hand the amount of work it takes to get a product to the level your talking about, and for the $500 to buy it, i would not consider putting this time and effort into a vehicle platform that has tuning support already.

Just my $0.02

Ryan
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Old Nov 16, 2006 | 10:36 AM
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I wrote my own stuff for the ELM chip in vb.net to do data overlay for my incar video.

It's OK for diagnostics, but ultimately I wanted to use a touchscreen for my gauges, and the ELM interface (actually SAE Jxxxx compliant interfaces) are too slow for that.

I'm running HPTuners now for my gauges, and the throughput is impressive. I just wish they had exposed an API
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Old Nov 16, 2006 | 10:14 PM
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Given the price of ELM327-based cables, versus the price of all of the parts - it's seriously the same price to just buy the whole premade thing.
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