If You Own Royal Enfield, You Can Use This OBD2 Dashboard

Compared to cars, motorcycles are absurdly stripped-down. My first motorcycle didn’t even have a fuel gauge — just a petcock valve and a tiny auxiliary section of the tank. But computers aren’t very constrained by space, so modern bikes tend to have a lot of available data that they simply don’t show you because the gauge pod is too small. If you own a Royal Enfield, then David Moca has a great solution for you.

The modern incarnation of Royal Enfield is all about affordable, basic bikes. I love that, but it does mean that most models are even more utilitarian than the average motorcycle. You do get a fuel gauge alongside the speedometer and tachometer, but not much else. So, Moca came up with a way to get all kinds of additional data on a tiny budget.

Moca developed this specifically for his Royal Enfield Interceptor 650, but it should work with many other Royal Enfield models. Moca seems to be actively supporting the project, adding relevant configurations for models requested by users. It may even work with bikes from other manufacturers, though you’re likely to get inaccurate data in some situations.

The only hardware you need for this is a Wi-Fi-equipped ELM327 OBD2 dongle. That gathers all of the data it can from the motorcycle’s ECU. Some of that data is standardized, but a lot of it is manufacturer-specific. Moca’s efforts have focused on deciphering that manufacturer-specific data and displaying it.

Interpreting the data is all about learning what each PID (Parameter Identifier) represents, which is why Moca is adding new models. To display the data, Moca designed a simple web app.

You can load that web app on a smartphone or something like a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. As long as you’re connected to the ELM327’s Wi-Fi network, that web app should display the incoming updates on a nice dashboard.

Just mount your smartphone to your handlebars and you’re ready to go. It will give you all kinds of data that the gauges don’t, like air intake temperature and fuel consumption.