Geek My Ride talk and car datalogger project

Wed, Aug 5 2009
Posted by Jonathan Oxer

Last night I had the opportunity to do a talk at Linux Users Victoria about hacking automotive electronics (check out my car page on Geek My Ride for some of the other stuff I like to play with!) and one of the things I showed off was the fourth-generation in-car system that I'm putting together. It's also being featured as one of the projects in Practical Arduino.

Right now it's fairly preliminary, but showing promise.



The bottom layer is an Arduino Mega. Stacked on top of that are two Mega prototyping shields from NKC Electronics, with the bottom shield fitted with both male headers and female headers so the second shield can stack on top of it. The bottom shield will be for the control outputs that are used to start / stop the car, lock / unlock it, etc, and the top shield is for comms and other sensors. The two devices you can see are a Locosys LS20031 GPS module from SparkFun on the lower left and a hacked ELM327-based OBD-II interface on the top right to talk to the engine management system.

Still to add are mass storage, networking, LCD, and a couple of other random bits.

Oh, and if you're interested in the Geek My Ride talk I did, the slides are up now as a PDF on the talks page of my personal site.