[xjohnx]

Originally Posted by nelsmar

^^^ this is correct.



Luckily our cars have SSM... which has a lot of functionality of reading / writing to memory. I don't know (as i haven't tested) what is actually permitted at this time for sending. Yes it is 100% possible to do something by re-writing memory to make the ECU think that events are happening. However it may require a patch to the ecu and re-require reflashing for all I know. I am actually new to this stuff but this is in the ballpark of what I do for a living so trying to catch up isn't taking me to long. Hell a few weeks ago I had no idea what the hell SSM was, or any of these protocols, or how the port even functioned and now I have some hardware fitted and am working on attempting to communicate with the ecu.






I am personally building a hardware datalogger. Basically take the idea of Torque, P3 gauge, and the tactrix cable and put them all in a blender. I am using a small LCD/OLED that as of current is going in my driver side vent, however I may relocate to mirror, or above my steering wheel. The idea is to allow you to configure the values you want to log, and a refresh rate.

This will act like a flight recorder for the event of catastrophic engine failure, mechanical issues etc. Anything that goes wrong i can simply hit a button and it will flag that moment in the log. Logs will rotate and run indefinitely. So say my car is sputtering? great! tap the button for flagging and it will add a flag in the log it writes to the SD card. Then when i get home i can pull the SD card, throw it in my computer and look at what was going on in the ecu.

Also tied with this is a small display that will show data that I feel is relevant to me. As of current the concept is showing AFR + a small 1-5 second graph with it showing AFR over the last few seconds (to visually see spikes), knock feedback, boost, ethanol reading, and warnings.

The idea of warnings is say my oil temps hit a certain temperature? the screen will flash + a red led (which will be programable) and one of the gauges that are lower priory will be swapped out for oil temps so i can monitor. I also plan on adding a few input/output connections for 0-5v input, and whatever for output for say an intercooler sprayer.





I was tired of dealing with using my laptop day to day to check things. And then when something goes wrong i have to pull it out and i cant re-produce it. I also have a P3 gauge and its great and all but it shows one thing at a time, and i would really like to see my AFR, OIL, and knock feed back (which it doesn't even have!!) all in one place at the same time. I hate when going on spirited drives i have to shut off my AFR to see my oil temps to make sure I'm not getting things crazy warm.

So that is the basic sum of the goal of my project, hopefully i can get caught up at this project I am behind on at work so I can push lots of effort into this. At first it will be basic and just display minor bits, then logging, then ill work up and make the UI a little better and work towards input/output + easy ways to config.

I planned on starting with a small processor in an easy to use platform to start, and if i start running out of headroom I can easily port my code over to a PIC/ARM cpu that is faster to handle things. I'll know pretty quickly what this little 16mhz amtel can do here soon.

sounds awesome. If you ever sold something like that, I might be interested in buying one.

I'm assuming when you press the "event" button it could be configured to also flag/save the data logged prior to the button push (say you push the button to log an event, it could be preconfigured to flag and save that entire trips log (since the last engine startup), or maybe flag/save X number of minutes that preceded the event button push, too?