CarPal! Your automobile's OBD-II dashboard buddy

Securily connect your car's onboard diagnostic port to the web with a MediaTek Linkit One, a gsm cell phone SIM and use the gprs service to share your location and record vital statistics. Is your check engine light on? You may be inadvertantly contributing to air pollution in your city. Help get to the bottom of it with CarPal, Your automobiles OBD2 dashboard buddy. Check engine light just come on? Send an SMS text to you car and get the Diagnostic Test Codes in reply.

Warning - never do repairs based on the DTC, do further tests or take it take an experienced mechanic, but you'll have a head start on the underlying problem.

With Linkit One GPS, you can share your location and speed with friend or relatives during your trip with Pubnub's EON maps so they'll know exactly when to expect you. Or record your location and statistics like engine load and other common On Board Diagnostics (OBD) II Parameters to other message queue and charting tools like Adafruit IO.

Many possibilities are opened up with the easily accessible Arduino IDE code and the Linkit One using a simple OBD2 adapter (stn1110 chip) thru a serial port. With an easy to use sms text control, start or stop publishing data such as gps location, vehicle speed, engine rpm and/or load, coolant temperature or any commonly available PID (OBD parameter id) to an Internet message queue via gprs cellular data circuit or to an sdcard in the Linkit One.   Send a command like "log start gprs location" and anyone who knows the url of your Pubnub Eon map will be able to find your location. Another command "log stop" ends logging. Going up a steep hill? Just text your car "log start sdcard location load coolant" to being saving your gps position, engine load and coolant temperature to a file on your sdcard. Text "get coolant" to get your water temperature, or "get dtc" to get the diagnostic test codes for why your check engine light just came on.

Current software status:  Just fixed a bug with sdcard filename, error checking if gps had satellite lock before setting date/time.  Code frozen for contest now. Next feature to add when I get back to it is make datetime a loggable option to turn on and off.

Added a startup commands txt file read from the sdcard root to setup initial logging, read and parsed by the sms text parser.

The software is in rapid development toward a usable system and is properly parsing sms text messages to turn logging of various data on & off to either Internet messaging or the on board sdcard. For a test of this, after starting, I sms text "Log start sdcard location load" to my car, and got data to create the map below of the trip with datapoints that show % engine load when the mouse hovers over them.

The possibilities are endless. Just give instructions and your car's phone number to your mechanic and they can have a head start on where the trouble lies before getting to the shop!

There are more possibilities that I can keep up with in code! Another one is, instead of 'pull' the DTC when a Check Engine Light comes on, CarPal can continuously monitor for it, and when it happens 'push', send an email to a pre-arranged service contract with your auto mechanic with the VIN and the DTC. They could check it out, then give you a call and say, "Hi, looks like you have a problem in your Evaporative Emission Control System - would you like to schedule an appointment next week to look at it?".

Another possibility is use a message queue that CarPal monitors for messages to control the logging and requests for data, in addition to sms texts (which my gsm cell plan charges 5 cents per, or 10 cents for command and results!). Also looking at adding email delivery of logs.

Usage: I am already putting CarPal! to use, while waiting for the car to warm up on this frosty 23 deg F morning, I can text "get coolant" and see how warm it actually is!