Makes more sense now. That would be really sweet to see! Especially if you could get and LCD maker to generate one that has the basic pc stuff behind it and just overlays the dash guages, so if something ever happened you'd still have the old ones to run off of.

 

just get a cheap OBDII to RS232 (serial port) off ebay for $20. You can hook that up to your computer, and there are numerous programs that read the data and display real-time data off of it. Some of them even give you 0-60 and 1/4 mile times, and the REALLY advanced ones use your transmission gearing and weight to estimate your hp, but thats pretty inaccurate.

 

sir_nasty... EXACTLY!! if it takes off, i have a few vendors i have contacts with that MIGHT be able to help.

nafango, that's cool.. i'll definitely have to check that out.. haven't found a connector like that, but then again i haven't looked..
for some reason i thought it'd be cool to start from scratch.
i wonder if they have that to USB instead of the 232 port...
i got some stuff to tend to,but will look later..

thanks for the insight.

 

ok i lied.. a quick search returned this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ELM32...ayphotohosting

it goes to a serial port, but has a usb conversion box it seems.

 

I would have used the USB, but I would imagine it is worlds harder to program for, plus I use linux, and I doubt its compatability with linux.

If I had the Money (no job) what I would do is make a cheap, old microatx comp w/ basically a mobo and a HDD, and stick em under the passenger seat along with a Power adapter and a weak PSU. (use a 600Mhz-1GHz box so to not drain too much power, plus thats more than enough to run console-based *nix and 1 program...). Then hook up the monitor output to the aux input of one of those fold-out screens (via RCA adapter). Then run like console-only red-hat with a OBDII scan tool set to init once you login. (and automate the login too). Then all you would have to do to get 0-60 times, cool looking charts, etc is switch to the aux input on your fold-out screen.
Although GUI support in linux is limited in OBDII software, im sure it will come along eventually.
wow i opened up a big box of nerdiness there...

but yea. If I ever had a project car, I would deff. do that.

 

lol, trust me.. i know all about that stuff..

i run gentoo, slackware, suse enterprise, and rhel amongst 250+ servers, not including the workstations and desktops all running gentoo or ubuntu (for my htpcs).

I also develop in windows and linux for a profession, so that's not even a concern of mine.

But you do raise an interesting point about cross compatibility.
Since I plan on doing most of the work in flash (for designer support), it should actually be really easy to launch something like fluxbox or openbox then the flash app.

The communication is still a serial socket; and from my experience with flash doesn't support this natively... I might have to write a small bridge..
Or I might just say screw it and start in C#, hoping that Mono catches up (with windows.forms), or at worst case to do a proof of concept app.

 

See why I was surprised that you 2 haven't been in touch!!!! j/k about the quote, but you 2 are on the same kind of brainwave!!!!

 

I'm reading these posts in english, but it feels like a foriegn language at the same time. Too 1337 for me.

 

back before i started using fedora 24/7 i used to program in C# all the time (ftw!). but mono sucks ballage X(
theres no win32api support (as far as i know of), so most of the more advanced C# stuff doesnt work or works really crappily in mono...
(unless its combined with wine, then it might work, but i havn't touched mono or wine in years... so for all i know it could be incredible now!)

I have yet to try programming for serial ports, no idea how they even communicate (like inet sockets i assume? ive done a little work in sockets but that was awile ago, about 1/2 python 1/2 C#).

sounds to me like the best bet would be Java, because of the cross compatability and flexibility socket-wise...
java is soooo similar to C#, you can literally learn it in about a day...

although now that you bring it up flash would definetly make the easiest/nicest GUI...
but sounds to me like a C++/C# framework for communicating serially would be your best bet down that road...

dunno...

 

why not write it in VB or VB.net? you could then include some code to have it wirelessly upload information about the car to an e-mail address and it interacts with various ports quite easily. The downside (of course) is that you'd have to use a windows based OS to run it or use unix/linux/freebsd with a bunch of plug ins....

Granted I haven't used C in a long time and the other languages I used to use are obsolete (Pascall, Basic/Qbasic) so I don't know how well this new stuff works...