Race Car Monitor

To evolve and develop your skills as a driver, it is worthwhile to review and reflect on your last drive at a professional as well as beginners level. The purpose of the project is to create such a system that can be used to record a drive by filming from the dashboard of the car and logging data from the vehicle. The summarized log is then used to evaluate a run. The system consists of two major parts: 1) an OBD-II reading-unit (hardware) that can be plugged in the OBD-II port in the vehicle to read data, and 2) an Android application run on an Android device. The application records the drive as well as a heads-up display (HUD) showing acceleration, GPS-location and some data gathered from the vehicle continuously. The OBD-II port is connected to engine control units in the vehicle. The reading unit follows the commands given by the application, reads the data and then sends them to the smartphone via Bluetooth. The reading unit consists of a STN-1170 microcontroller which supports a large roster of diagnostics protocols, and a HC-06 Bluetooth module. The unit is plugged in the OBD-II port to get the measurement data and transmits the data to the smartphone. To validate the system, a CAN simulation unit (CAN simulator) was created that acts as the OBD-II port (or socket) in a vehicle based on OBD standard diagnostics protocol. The simulator was designed as a shield for an Arduino UNO. The Arduino was programmed to act as an OBD-II port in a vehicle supporting the CAN protocol. Utilizing two components: MCP2515, which translates between SPI and CAN, and MCP2551, which prepares the CAN signal for transmission on the physical bus, allows the Arduino to communicate the simulated data through SPI which, in turn, was translated into and transmitted on the physical bus using CAN. The parameters: vehicle speed, vehicle RPM and throttle-position, could be controlled using a set of potentiometers, these parameters were used to validate the system. The system was tested using the testbench with the simulator. The test results have shown that both the system and the simulator work well. The Android application requested parameters such as RPM, speed and throttle positioning while also updating the GPS-location of the vehicle and reading the acceleration using the smartphone’s accelerometer. The OBD-II reading unit received the request from the application through Bluetooth, transferred it to the microcontroller via UART, translated the request into a command in the CAN protocol and sent it to the simulator. At the next command transmitted to the simulator, the reading unit would collect the previous command’s result, which was transferred back to the phone in the reverse order. The information collected from the vehicle was tagged using a timestamp and subsequently logged in a .txt-file