Advice with OBD2 on MX5

[LCNewton]

Hi all,

I am new to all this, very new.....

I have just completed my mechanical engineering degree and am car mad. I have owned and run classic cars for a long time (mature student) however I have just picked up an MX5 Mk2.5.... as my new track toy to try and take some strain of my MG witch will be used for classic rallying in the future.

Having such a modern car has made me think about applying some technology to my driving and importantly optimising the car and indeed the nut behind the wheel (me). This has lead me hear. As I say I am very new to ALL of this, give me a carburettor and distributor and a been axel and I'm a happy man but beyond that and I am a little lost.

I would like to set up a dater logger in the car.

Ideally being able to record OBD2 data, a camera, GPS data, a potentiometer or 2, an accelerometer, a few thermocouples, pressure sensors and be able to expand this in the future. Eg a wideband lambda reading.

I would like everything hard wired and the accelerometer attached solidly to the car, the camera attached to the front of the car, some thermocouples on brake pads, under bonnet temp, ambient temp, a potentiometer on the brake pedal (OBD2 should cover throttle position), ambient pressure and manifold pressure.

Reading around this appears as though its something I can do with a raspberry PI but where do I start? I guess I start with a PI and a few sensors and work from there but witch?

The OBD2 looks like it connects with a USB port but what about the rest?

I think I would like to start by getting the OBD2, GPS and camera and go from there? Can people recommend where to start? Which bits can I bye and start learning? where to get them from etc.

Thinking about expansion how should I plan for this?? ensuring I don't have to re do stuff in the future to enable the expansion......

Thanks in advanced for any help,

All the best,

Leon

[SlumberMachine]

This is fully possible, but start small. First interface with OBD2. That will give most info right off the bat. This has been done a few times already, so you can check out what those people have done. https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/c ... n_your_pi/

There is a sub on reddit (I cant find it otherwise I would link it here) where they are working on a car project for pi also.

[texy]

Thread title changed to something more meaningful.
Texy

[pieman82]

Hi LCNewton,

As has been pointed out before, this is very do-able with a Pi. This is in fact a great use for the Pi. There are several ways to do this, some are more advanced than others. What you need to do is approach this as you would fixing a car from the bottom, one step at a time. I would focus on the OBD part first and approach it in this order:

1) Getting OBD connection with you PI -> find a device that you can easily connect to from your Pi (usb or bluetooth). Its important that the device has a chip built in, which is able to communicate with the bus in the car (ELM)
2) Communication with your car -> You are best of starting with a lib, which integrates most of the OBD communication. Search for pyobd on google and you will get various python libs with obd (here is one: https://github.com/Pbartek/pyobd-pi)
3) Start simple and return some data you can see dirrectly in the car display (like speed or rpm). Here is a list of more PID you can try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBD-II_PIDs

This is just covering the OBD part of the project you are doing. Next step is GPS, sensors and accelerometer. I suggest you make a new post for these or search the forum. There are a lot of other posts on these.

By the way, I love the MX5 - It's just too cold to drive with the hood down, where I'm from

Good luck with the project.