Got to thinking as soon as I woke up. When you have an obd2 vehicle that has a speedo and idiot lights for the rest but would like to not be an idiot.
Would a Bluetooth obd2 dongle plus a cheap android tablet with the Torque app give you a digital dash to monitor everything else from?
Yes. BTDT
Yes. 2nd'd. Response times can be a little slow updating the display depending on what dongle and software you use. There are other projects out there besides Torque ...
Use a tablet with accelerometers and a good GPS unit that does not rely on a network connection for assistance for pos, speed and altitude so you can also run lap time software on a split screen.
If you are the sort who likes to fiddle in the guts of the software to do your own thing... check this out http://openxcplatform.com/
Fixing the LCD odometer in the Quest required taking apart the gouges and removing the pointers from the speedo and tach. What I was left with was a working odo and non working pointers.
I have a old Scangauge so I have been running that for Speed and RPM as well as volt and temp.
Huckleberry wrote: Yes. 2nd'd. Response times can be a little slow updating the display depending on what dongle and software you use. There are other projects out there besides Torque ... Use a tablet with accelerometers and a good GPS unit that does not rely on a network connection for assistance for pos, speed and altitude so you can also run lap time software on a split screen. If you are the sort who likes to fiddle in the guts of the software to do your own thing... check this out http://openxcplatform.com/
I found Torque and liked it so much that I havent looked beyond it. What am I missing?
Just keep in mind that GPS speed is inherently very laggy no matter the frequency or accuracy of your GPS receiver...it's an unavoidable side-effect of measuring speed by where you've been.
if i use the dongle i should be pulling ecm speed. and if the car has a speedo anyway i'd be watching that.
another idea for this is the next $20xx project car, which will be obd2 in an extremely old chassis, it would be way easier and cheaper to tap into the data stream and use a tablet as a poor man's racepak than to procure a bunch of gauges.
The spec for OBD2 update speeds is very slow, something like 4 data values per second. If you're only displaying speed that's probably fine, but if you're pulling a dozen things then you're going to see your speed update every 3 seconds. It's really not useful as a track-oriented data logging system for this reason, IMHO.
Some manufacturers (hell, probably all of them at this point) have proprietary extensions to OBD2 that allow faster data logging, but I have no idea if any of the common cheap interfaces can use them.
Why hasn't someone made a digi-dash program that utilizes tach rpm only? Then you just input settings such as gearing, tire size and final drive to get the nearest accurate mph. (I guess it would need to know what gear it's in too...)
Just ordered a well reviewed cheap 7" android bluetooth tablet off amazon. Already have the obd2 dongle. Time to see how it works
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