Vehilytics: Technical Report

This report discusses my attempts to design and build a system that allows vehicle owners to more easily understand the information gathered and reported by their vehicle, and to manage routine maintenance tasks all from an Android application. Currently there are similar systems that exist for expensive vehicles that require the use of manufacturer specific hardware and have no simple equivalent for cheap or mid-range cars. The motivation for building this system arose from seeing vehicles break down from issues that would have been easily avoidable had the gathered data been exposed to the owner of the vehicle such as, the battery voltage gradually becoming too low to be able to start the car. This battery voltage can be graphed to show a fall in voltage over days or weeks leading up to the breakdown. In more expensive cars, this information is easily accessed by the owner through a dashboard display or a proprietary mobile application. My aim is to provide this functionality to any vehicle regardless of the manufacturer or value of the vehicle. The project consists of 3 subsystems: a diagnostics reader, an Android application, and a Ruby on Rails API. The diagnostic reader provides an interface with the vehicle to gather and report various sensor readings. The Android application allows the user to view the sensor readings in a readable format and set preferences for which sensors should be reported. The Rails API acts as the bridge between the Android application and the diagnostic reader by persisting the data and exposing it to both. The API is designed in such a way that the reports can come from any device authenticated to use the endpoints and the consuming client could be any mobile application or web page that provides a login option for the user to allow them to authenticate with the web service