An Easy Way to Get Data From Your Vehicle

Here we introduce an easy way to get data from OBD-II connector of your vehicle, as well as GPS data. OBD-II, the Second On-Board Diagnostics, is an automotive term referring to a vehicle's self-diagnostic and reporting capability. OBD systems give the vehicle owner or repair technician access to the status of the various vehicle subsystems.

Step 1: What Do We Need

We need,

1. An OBD-II CAN Bus GPS Development kit from Longan-Labs.

2. An micro SD card

The development kit allows you to access your vehicle’s CAN bus via the OBD-II connector. The development kit can be connected (plugged) to your vehicle’s OBD-II port (On-Board Diagnostics port). The base board of the development kit is integrated with an Atmega32U4 microprocessor.
The CAN-Bus library is available to write sketches using Arduino IDE to send and receive messages from the CAN bus network and also allows you to fetch useful data from the messages. The output data can be taken through the USB Type-C port or you can store them to a micro-SD card (TF card) by inserting to the microSD slot. The main board in the kit is based on MCP2551 CAN transceiver and MCP2515 CAN receiver, which provides baud rate from 5kb/s to 1Mb/s. A NEO-6 GPS breakout is seated on the base board allows you to track your vehicle with this fantastic small module by logging the GPS data to a microSD card.

Step 2: Software

Few steps to follow:

1. Download the sketch from Github, which include the demo code and libraries.

2. You need a Typy-C usb cable for connect the board to a PC.

3. Open your Arduino IDE, and upload the sketch to the board. More details.

Step 3: Insert the Device to Your Vehicle

Insert a micro SD card to the board, then you can put the board to OBD-II connector of your vehicle.

OBD-II interface is generally below the steering wheel, you won't miss it.

Step 4: View the Result

You will get 2 file for each trip, an .csv file and a .kml file.

You can open the csv will with MS Excel, to get the speed, rpm as well as some others data.

KML file is the GPS logs, you can open it with Google Earth.

Enjoy your hacking!

Comments

[NedwobAJB]

I bought one of these devices hoping to log engine data during journeys. However, I've had no success getting it to work. Various problems including initialising the SD card and getting any data from the GPS. I'm using Arduino IDE 1.8.10 on a Mac to load the sketch. Has anyone got one of these devices to work?

[FollowMyJump]

I used to make this with Arduino and canbus shield, but now much easier in your way. And if 4G network is available, it would be quite cool and interesting.

[NedwobAJB]

I bought one of these devices hoping to log engine data during journeys. However, I've had no success getting it to work. Various problems including initialising the SD card and getting any data from the GPS. I'm using Arduino IDE 1.8.10 on a Mac to load the sketch. Has anyone got one of these devices to work?

[audreyobscura]

Can you elaborate as to why someone may want to use this system? It's cool, but I'm not sure why someone would want to access the data, or how it could be used.

[dchang0]

Here's another example of a real-world use. A friend of mine moved across the country. He had a car shipping company ship his off-roading truck. When he got his truck back, some of the contents had been removed and other contents were not his. It looked like the shipper had driven his truck into the woods and had a camp-out, because they left camping supplies.

If he had had a GPS tracker in his vehicle running under the dash, he could have shown the owner of the shipping firm the proof that one of the employees had taken his truck for a spin.

[Longan Labs]

Hello, for some old cars, they don't have a intelligent system, then you can get data from OBD-II in this way, you can just store the records, or you can make some simple modifications to meet your requirement.