Arduino OBD-II Kit available for order


After many researches and attempts to connect an Arduino with my car through the OBD-II port and having some successful works, I’ve finally made a kit which enables those who want to playing with Arduino and their cars to jump start quickly.

The Arduino OBD-II Kit consists of a OBD-II UART adapter based on a ELM327 compatible chip which provides an OBD-II to UART data bridge, and a dedicated open-source library for Arduino 1.0. The adapter outputs UART serial data and regulated 5V power supply sufficent for powering Arduino and some attached devices. The adapter can be used with any embedded system in addition to Arduino platform.

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Distance measuring with Arduino


After modifying a USB GPS receiver to use with Arduino, I continued to make a further attempt to measure distance between two locations with Arduino. The idea is straight-forward, when pressing a key, current location is stored and used as start location. The line distance of current location and the start location is calculated and displayed on the LCD on the spot. Next steps are: (1) allowing entering GPS coordinates of a location (2) calculating and displaying trip distance.

If the distance between two locations is not too long, the calculation of the line distance between them can be simplified a lot by treating the earth as flat.
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Modify USB GPS receiver to use with Arduino


Most common USB GPS receivers come with a USB connector with a UART-to-USB chip built in. That means the GPS receiver itself provides serial UART output. So they can be used with Arduino by replacing it’s USB connector with Rx/Tx and VCC/GND connectors. My practical test has proved that this works. What you need to make sure of is the baudrate of the GPS receiver.


Common USB GPS receiver with modified connectors

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Vehicle Telemetry Platform


Ever wondered what goes on under the hood of your car? Wish you could peek inside the engine management system and read values from it? Annoyed that your dashboard displays a cryptic “Check Engine” light (yep, the engine is still there) but gives absolutely no explanation what the problem might be?

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