Visit to Scantool.net

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So for the past month I’ve been on travel for work in Arizona. Yesterday I was on my way home, and happened to be in Phoenix. As it turns out, scantool.net’s HQ is located in Phoenix so I dropped by for a visit. I had not initially realized how large of a staff they have on site, but a good number of them took time out of their day to talk to me and I really appreciate that. I actually wound up being there for several hours. Between discussions over CAN network and sitting in the Chevy Sonic I had rented to decode a variety of CAN messages using their can sniffer, it was a very eventful and interesting day.

Initially we got into discussions about CAN based OBD2 messaging, specifically the meanings of the different identifiers in 11bit vs 29bit. It seems that there were a few different modes of CAN That I was confused about the OBDLink MX’s return values for. There are a few different CAN modes that the OBDLink MX supports, the main differencing factors are 11vs29bit, and 15765 vs 11898 protocols. 15765 has an extra byte in the return for PCI, or Protocol Control Information field, defined here. This was of course, throwing my software through a loop since I wasn’t handling this, and this made for an extra byte on top of everything else. 11898 CAN does not have this identifier, since it is just RAW can values. The OBDLink does not actually return what is listed in the wikipedia article on CAN_Bus, adding even more confusion. The underlying CAN hardware internal to the OBDLink MX strips out start-of-frame, the RTR/IDE bits, and the DLC (unless otherwise requested to show it via ATD1 if I remember correctly).

Armed with this new information, we moved into a conference room, set up one of their wonderful OBD2 simulators, a Y cable, and a second laptop/tool to attempt to try out my new CAN Parser software to sniff what a CAN datatool is doing. Of course, as with anything technology we ran into a few issues. The first of which was the fact that I was running linux. When connecting over rfcomm using a bluetooth adapter on linux, you have to manually bind the rfcomm channel on your device to access /dev/rfcomm0. This is a bit of a hassle, since upon power cycling the device, or disconnecting screen from that particular pty, it breaks the connection and you have to unbind and rebind, which doesn’t seem to work 100% of the time. This is not an issue with the Obdlink MX, this is a linux issue since windows has no issues keeping the com port connected and active even under device powercycles. I will have to investigate more thoroughly if there is a method for easy connecting under linux.

The few times we actually got it to work, I realized that there were a lot of contingencies I did not actually plan for in the writing of my CanParse application. So after some mad random coding, and a bit of pizza and soda (thanks guys!), we moved out into the car. Jason, from what I can tell (forgive me if I get this wrong), one of the hardware guys hooked up his can sniffer to the Chevy Sonic, while I hooked up the OBDLink MX via Y-cable. Couple of weird things happened, including the rpm dial flickering up and down and random dingings of the door alarm, even when the door was closed. We figured this was just his can sniffer doing something weird, and moved on. Unfortunately I did learn that my CanParse application is missing a few key usefulness features that will be required before it is used in such a fashion to actually decode what is happening on the CAN bus. I will be detailing these in a later post as I write them into the code. Using Jason’s scan sniffer application, we were able to decode several things over the course of about two hours, including how to control the radio from the steering wheel controls, and how to identify when the lock/unlock and blinkers went on and off. We were unable to control the blinkers or locks, possibly due to a gateway node on the CAN network blocking our traffic, or us just not seeing the proper commands and only viewing notifications. Not entirely sure, but it was still very cool information to have. Just an example, but one could write a piece of hardware that monitors the CAN network, and logs lock-unlock events, turn signals, speed, rpm, a whole bunch of values to identify if someone is driving the car appropriately, or dangerously. I can think of a couple companies which could benefit from this, a couple who would want this, and a couple who NEED this :) .

Couple of other key things to note that came out of this meeting. There is an asynchronous communications mode that is eventually planned (ATMA mode with bidirectional communication), however logistically it’s not simple, so it may not happen very soon. It is definitely on their minds though, which is a huge bonus to the CAN crowd. I know that pretty much anyone with a MX and a CAN car would benefit from this, so I can only hope that they implement it soon.

The other thing had to do with CAN masks, I’ll go over that in my next post along with ATMA/STMA/STM differences.

Couple of pictures.

 

Their offices, they have cubicles

This is the back side of the cubicles. They’re not too large. There is a little white fan looking thing to the left of the paper cutter. It is a Wimshurst Electrostatic Generator. And let me tell you, even through 4-5 people, it still hurts.

This is the lab, they have cool workbenches for assembling stuff ESD safe-like.

And last but not least, me standing with the guys who took so much time out of their days to talk to me and deal with all my questions. From left to right, Joe, Jason, Me, Vitaliy, Vitaliy. That’s right, there are two of them. And I thought it was a unique name :) . Thanks again guys!

OBD2 CAN Parsing

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So I’ve been on travel for a few weeks, and the rental vehicle I got is a Chevy Sonic. Ignoring the fact that it’s a brand new shitbox, I noticed that it has GMLan. I fortunately brought my OBDLink MX along with me so I can plug in and play with the car. Upon playing around a little with a terminal I found that messages go by so fast, that it’s really not practical to use a terminal at all for monitoring CAN messages. I put together a little CanParser application to assist in the process, and this lead me to try and figure out exactly how to parse CAN messages.

For all intents and purposes in the automotive world you can break down CAN messages into 11bit, and 29bit. This is how many bits are in the header of each message. The Sonic uses both, however predominantly 29bit so that is where I focused my efforts. Let’s take a long at some messages.

10 30 40 58 C0 9A 01
10 22 00 40 00 00 00 00 0F FD 00 00
10 30 80 60 C0 9A 01
10 22 E0 40 00 1B EC C3 C0 49 0A C6

10 30 40 is the header for the first message, and the rest is the actual message. The header can be broken apart into priority, param, and source IDs. The priority is bits 4,5, and 6 of the first byte, so that would be a priority of 4. Param is split between the first three bytes. Two bits of the first, the entire second, and third. Source is then the 4th byte This may seem a bit confusing, so I’ll break it down bit by bit. Say we have the message:

10 0A C0 97 82 08 01 FF D4
The header is 10 0A C0 97
  1  |   0  |   0  |   A  |   C  |   0  |   9  |   7
0001 | 0000 | 0000 | 1010 | 1100 | 0000 | 1001 | 0111
Written another way:
000 | 100 | 00000010100110 | 0000010010111
0     4         56               97

Skip 3 bytes in the front, then the next 3 is the priority, b100, or 0×04.
The next 14 are the paramID, 0×56, and the last 13 are the source ID, 0×97. then the rest of the message, 82 08 01 FF D4 is the packet that we want to play with. Unfortunately this is as far as I have gotten. I’ve not been able to figure out what any of the messages on the vehicle mean yet, but I’m slowly working on it.

I also have not yet been able to figure out how to parse 11bit CAN headers, with any luck that will be next.

ObdLibSharp

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I’ve recently taken libobd, and ported it to c#! It actually wasn’t all that difficult to do either. A long time ago when I first started writing libobd, I made the decision to keep the core communications library, the one that handes the actual serial communication, parsing out messages, but not handling them, as a seperate library. It’s compiled into libobd, but it’s written in pure c++ so it can be compiled on any platform without library dependancies. This allows my to export functions and hook into them from any language, for instance, from c# using pinvoke.

pinvoke is a very powerful tool that allows you to load a library at runtime, and call functions within that library. The main limiting factor, is that the functions must not be name-mangled, as a c++ compiler often does. Compiling functions defined as extern “C” causes the compiler to not mangle the names, and thus allows me to call the functions from c#. Below are a few of the functions I put into libobd to allow me to use it:

__declspec(dllexport) void *obdLibNew()
{
return new obdLib();
}
__declspec(dllexport) int obdLibOpenPort(void *ptr,const char *portname,int baudrate)
{
obdLib *lib = ((obdLib*)ptr);
return lib->openPort(portname,baudrate);
}

The declspec(dllexport) means that the function will be exported with cdecl calling convention. This is important, as here are the counterpart function prototypes in c#:

[DllImport(obdlibloc, EntryPoint = "obdLibNew")]
public static extern IntPtr obdLibNew();
[DllImport(obdlibloc, CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
public static extern int obdLibOpenPort(IntPtr ptr, String portname, Int32 baudrate);

The way this works, is I can call obdLibNew() from c#, and it returns an IntPtr. this IntPtr is a pointer to the actual instance of the c++ library. While technically this is having unmanaged code inside c#, and therefore very dangerous, if done correctly is is a perfectly fine and valid way to interop between C++ and c#. One issue that I ran into, was how to pass a string from a c# application into the C dll file. This was easily solved by using byte[].

__declspec(dllexport) bool obdLibSendObdRequest(void *ptr,const char *req,int length, char *reply,int replylength,int sleeptime, int timeout)
{
obdLib *lib = ((obdLib*)ptr);
std::vector<byte> replyvect;
if (!lib->sendObdRequest(req,length,&replyvect,sleeptime,timeout))
{
return false;
}
if (replyvect.size() > replylength)
{
//Not enough room in the buffer
return false;
}
for (int i=0;i<replyvect.size();i++)
{
reply[i] = replyvect.at(i);
}
return true;
}

[DllImport(obdlibloc, EntryPoint = "obdLibSendObdRequestString", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
public static extern bool obdLibSendObdRequestStringTwo(IntPtr ptr, String req, Int32 length, byte[] reply, Int32 replylength, out Int32 returnlength, Int32 sleeptime, Int32 timeout);

What this does, is it allows me to say in c#:

byte[] mybyte = new byte[1024];
int retlength = 0;
obdLibSendObdRequestString(ptr,”010C\r”,5,mybyte,1024,out retlength,10,1000);

This passes mybyte into the function, so mybyte is automatically filled with the reply, and retlength tells us how much of mybyte was used. It may seem hokey, but it works really well and reliably every time. This has allowed me to create a c# wrapper for the underlying obdlib class: http://www.mp3car.com/showthread.php?t=150896

So if you’ve ever wanted to integrate obd2 into a .net application but didn’t know where to start, there you go!

This is also available on libobd’s git at https://gitorious.org/libobd

 

 

 

CuteIPC

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A project I’ve been working on, and testing in conjunction with tripzero, is something I call CuteIPC. Play on words for an Inter-Process Communication framework based off Nokia’s Qt (pronounced cute). The entire concept for this came from one of many arguments I have with tripzero, in which I proclaim that my monolithic style carpc frontend for the Windows Operating System is more beneficial from both a development and user standpoint than his multi-process Linux based concept. I’ll spout about exactly what that means in a later post.

As I often do, I gave trip the benefit of the doubt. We started discussing the limiting factors of a multi-process approach to a piece of software, and what hurdles would have to be overcome to make multi-process programming efficient. The big one was a lack of a decent cross-platform IPC framework. Qt has internally several IPC classes, however they all had limiting factors that guided us to the decision that we would have to write our own. The idea was to emulate the server-client architecture of dbus, where clients could offer services for any other client to take advantage of.

The implementation details involved the server running a TCP daemon on a offbeat port of localhost, so any client could connect, register its presents on the “bus”, and communicate with other clients connected to the bus. This is about how the typical IPC that I came across had worked. So why write our own? In three words: QObject JSON Proxies. What this does, is it allows me to procedurally generate class definitions of any client on the bus in JSON. Basically defining the interface that is exposed on the bus. Function calls, Signals and Slots, Properties, etc. Once these are defined in JSON, they are transmitted across the bus to any client who requests it. The client can then generate a header in ANY language, using this JSON as a definition file for how to generate the interface header.

Through some fancy code-trickery, this allows an application developer who is writing a GUI application, to access and use say, OBD2 functionality as if it was built into their program, even though it is seamlessly being ported over the IPC. An example is in order I believe.

{ “busname”:”revfeobd”, “name”:”RevFEObd”, “signals”: [ { "name":"pidReply", "args": [  {"type":"QString","name":"mode"}, {"type":"QString","name":"pid"}, {"type":"int","name":"set"}, {"type":"double","name":"time"} ] }, { “name”:”protocolReply”,  “args”: [ {"type":"QString","name":"protocol"} ] }, { “name”:”mfgStringReply”, “args”: [ {"type":"QString","name":"mfg"} ] } ] , “slots”: [ { "name":"deleteLater", "args": [ ] }, {  “name”:”addPid”, “args”: [ {"type":"QString","name":"pid"} ] } ] }

Looks like a mess dosen’t it? What this actually does, is define an interface for the RevFEObd class on the bus under the name revfeobd. Using this JSON as a template, we can generate this header file:

#include <QObject>
#include <cuteipc.h>
class RevFEObd : public QObject
{
Q_OBJECT
public:
RevFEObd(CuteIpc *ipc) {
m_ipc = ipc;
m_ipc->addObject(this);
ipc->connectFunctionToSlot(“revfeobd”,”RevFEObd”,”pidReply”,this,”pidReplySlot”);
ipc->connectFunctionToSlot(“revfeobd”,”RevFEObd”,”protocolReply”,this,”protocolReplySlot”);
ipc->connectFunctionToSlot(“revfeobd”,”RevFEObd”,”mfgStringReply”,this,”mfgStringReplySlot”);
}
CuteIpc *m_ipc;
signals:
void pidReply( QString mode,QString pid,int set,double time);
void protocolReply( QString protocol);
void mfgStringReply( QString mfg);

public slots:
void pidReplySlot(QString mode,QString pid,int set,double time) {
emit pidReply(mode,pid,set,time);
}
void protocolReplySlot(QString protocol) {
emit protocolReply(protocol);
}
void mfgStringReplySlot(QString mfg) {
emit mfgStringReply(mfg);
}
void deleteLater() {
m_ipc->callFunction(“revfeobd”,”RevFEObd”,”deleteLater”,QList<QVariant>());
}
void addPid(QString pid) {
m_ipc->callFunction(“revfeobd”,”RevFEObd”,”addPid”,QList<QVariant>()<<pid);
}
};

Ignoring all the bad formatting, this is generated procedurally at runtime. You can then compile this header into your application, and you have direct access to OBD2 functionality. Of course this still leaves the option of directly accessing the IPC and sending JSON calls directly, but the header generation provides for a much easier interface for those unfamiliar with JSON. It also allows for generation in languages other than c++. I’ve already gotten mostly written a c# header generator, which will allow for .net applications to take full advantage of anything running on the IPC bus.

Gumstix enclosures, a total mistake

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So just a few days ago I posted about some Gumstix boards I had purchased. Today I sat down and attempted to put together the other enclosure for the Palo43 board. I have to say, I am completely and totally disappointed. I retract my previous statement about them being “not so bad”, and replace it with “You’re better off with no case at all”.

So I took this case out of the box, and it came, like the other, pre-assembled

Alright, that’s fairly typical, the other case came the same way. I started unbolting it to take it apart and I immediatly ran into issues. I got the back plate off, that came off easy. The side plates however, were stuck in place. I pried at them, wiggled them, even heated them up to no avail. Two things happened as I was prying:

There is a crack in the corner, it broke REALLY easy. Some of you might look at that picture, and see what I initially did not see; the reason for all my issues. Continuing on, I broke another part:

After this one broke, I realized that I could not insert the board with both the side plates on. It’s just not possible, since the board has to slide in at an angle, and you can’t attach the screen ribbon cable if you want to slide it in sideways. I did a bit closer of an examination, and I discovered… the parts are GLUED. Unlike the first case, this one is held together by glue. So I can not get the sides apart, and I can not insert the board with them together. Great. Useless. No wonder he provides no support unless he assembles them with the board included. I definitely will NOT be purchasing anything else from specialcomp, and nor should you if you expect to get even half your money’s worth. I am going to be creating my own cases, and to be honest, I’ll bet I could duplicate these case designs fairly easily and sell them for even cheaper. I’m not even going to post any of the rest of the pictures of the build. I got the LCD screen in, and it’s held in haphazardly, so it’s really not worth even talking about.

So moral of this story: Sometimes… you don’t get what you pay for. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and run. Today… I am running.

Gumstix. Not so edible.

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Recently I was lucky enough to acquire a Gumstix single board computer. I got an Overo Air COM, along with both a Palo43 and Tobi expansion boards. In playing with them, I quickly realized that I would need an enclosure to protect the boards while I did development work. I did some searching, and found some vague references on a few of the forums to enclosures, but nothing really solid. Then I came across a website called SpecialComputing. They sell cases for an assortment of single board ARM computers, including the igep, beagleboard, and gumstix. The only unfortunate thing is that they don’t offer the enclosure by itself, without the board inside. I contacted them and they agreed to make an exception, and sell me two enclosures.  I’ve chronicled the process of assembling the Tobi board below, I’ve not gotten a chance to get the Palo43 board put together yet.

This is what it comes with. 6 sides to the box, 8 acrylic nuts, 4 acrylic spacers, and 4 acrylic bolts. My initial impression, is its solid construction, and precise cuts. With the exception of the reset button hole, next to the console cutout , which was bored out with a file it looked like.

The bolts pass up from the bottom as the easiest way to assemble the enclosure.

Then, the spacers go on

And the board goes on.

Thus far, it all seems to fit together pretty good, the nuts go on next. The plastic nuts hit both the ethernet port, and the power jack. They snug up just fine, but it is of slight concern that they hit the components, and may eventually call undue strain.

I put the walls all around the enclosure, they fit on easily and well… and then I noticed something interesting. the USB port was the wrong size! Doing some search, it seems that these enclosures were made for an older revision of the Tobi. Nice that SpecialComputing didn’t mention that, I suppose that’s why they said “We offer no support for this” since they knew there was a new revision, and their enclosure wouldn’t fit. That’s ok though, it’s still perfectly functional, just without a USB host port. I can cut the hole out later fairly easily.

Hardly a USB port :)

Put the top on, it took a bit of doing, due to the plastic nuts hitting the components, the bolts were bent outwards slightly. A bit of wiggling, and I got the top on and bolted down.

All put together! I powered it up and did some tests, it of course, runs just fine inside there. I’m a bit concerned about temperature, since the acrylic doesn’t transfer the heat generated by the gumstix that well. Machining a new top to the case out of aluminum, and putting a heatsink on it would definitely help.

Overall, the case is decently built. A few minor concerns that I wouldn’t believe I should have considering the price… but I suppose without getting something custom made you can’t really get perfection. I’ve not found any other cases for sale anywhere, so not bad for being the only game in town.

I’ll post more about my adventures in the software world with the gumstix, sometime later.

OpenSSL and Qt on windows

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Apologies for the long length in time between posts. I’ve been pretty busy, between looking for a house, and working long hours, I’ve not had much time to myself to post here. I’ll try to post more often. I do have content to post, just not the time to sort it out into comprehensible and informative posts.

Anyway, as part of my RevFE project, I’ve been working on an interface to mp3car’s AutoAppMart to allow for runtime download and install of plugins and misc applications. I do most of my development on Linux (kubuntu yay!), and then transfer source over to windows to compile and test for releases. I’ve gotten most of the core functionality to connect to the AutoAppMart and download apps complete, so I was transferring over to windows to compile and test when I noticed that I was unable to connect at all. After some digging I realized that the AutoAppMart uses https to communicate with the AutoAppMart itself. This is all find an dandy in Linux, since by default Qt comes with SSL built in, but in windows it fell flat on its face.

To use Qt in windows is usually a fairly lengthy process
1: Download MSVC++ express
2: Download Qt latest source, extract.
3: Wait 3-4 hours for it to compile
4: Done

However, doing it this way caused SSL support to be nonexistant. So, doing a bit of research I discovered that you can download OpenSSL in windows, compile it and point Qt to it for it to work. To install openssl, you go to their website, and download the latest. I used 1.0.0g with Qt 4.8.0 and it worked fine, your mileage may vary. You also need some version of Perl, I used ActivePerl, though any should work. Extract OpenSSL to any location (I used c:\openssl), then cd to that directory and run:

perl Configure VC-WIN32 no-asm –prefix=c:\libs\openssl

Assuming oyu want to use c:\libs\openssl as the output directory. Then type

ms\do_ms
nmake -f ms\ntdll.mak

This will generate and compile OpenSSL using nmake’s makefiles, and will generate linkable dll’s and lib files. Once this is complete, you have to recompile Qt. Go to the Qt directory, and run

nmake confclean

Wait 30 minutes while it cleans Qt

configure.exe -platform win32-msvc2010 -opensource -shared -debug-and-release -openssl-linked -I C:\libs\openssl\include -L C:\libs\openssl\lib

When it lists the included modules, be sure it says OpenSSL: linked. This means that you will have OpenSSL support available to you for your own applications.

Most of this information came from this blog, so thanks to him for posting it up. I figured I’d repost here just in case someone came across mine in search of the same answer.

VLC Video on a QML Surface

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One of my ongoing projects, is a information and entertainment software for use in an automotive environment on a carpc, or a Frontend, called RevFE. It is written in c++/Qt like a lot of my projects, and makes heavy use of QML for the entirety of it’s GUI. Very recently I switched from Qt’s phonon, to libvlc to play the audio, and I found some interfaces that would allow me to play video as well, but it’s not exactly straightforward.

The best example of what I was trying to do came from the libvlc doc pages: http://wiki.videolan.org/LibVLC_SampleCode_SDL

This is close to what I’m trying to do, since QML is QGraphicsView based, I am unable to simply pass libvlc a winid or xorg window handle to paint on, I have to actually do the painting myself. I figured the best way to achieve this, would be to have the scene update an image in the background, and paint it on the screen every so often (30-60 frames per second or so). To create a custom QML item, you can subclass QDeclarativeItem, and override the function  paint(QPainter *painter, const QStyleOptionGraphicsItem *option, QWidget *widget). I did just this:

void VideoWidget::paint(QPainter *painter, const QStyleOptionGraphicsItem *option, QWidget *widget)
{
pixmapMutex.lock();
painter->drawImage(0,0,*pix);
pixmapMutex.unlock();
}

The mutex of course, is so that I don’t accidently write on the image while I’m drawing it. So this was simple enough, I was now painting an image (QImage) pix, onto the screen. As per the libvlc doc example, I now wanted to take the image data and put it into my QImage. You do this via the lock, unlock, and display static (or at least global) functions. Conveniently, they allow you to specifiy your own data pointer, so passing my QDeclarativeItem based class as that pointer, I can access my pixmap and mutex.

static void *lock(void *data, void **p_pixels)
{
((VideoWidget*)data)->pixmapMutex.lock();
*p_pixels = ((VideoWidget*)data)->pix->bits();
return NULL;
}
static void unlock(void *data, void *id, void *const *p_pixels)
{
((VideoWidget*)data)->pixmapMutex.unlock();
//((VideoWidget*)data)->update(((VideoWidget*)data)->boundingRect());
}

Inside the lock function, I’m setting p_pixels to the actual data on my QImage. This allows libvlc to directly draw into my QImage’s memory space, rather than me having to take care of it. Then, in the unlock, I’m calling update on my QDeclarativeItem, to make it redraw the screen and display the frame. This worked alright, but used a lot of CPU usage, so I commented that out, and made a timer to call update(boundingRect()); 50 times per second. This makes for smooth video, without excessive CPU usage. A simple application only playing a dvd iso video, uses from 10-15% cpu on an average dual core cpu (2ghzish core2duo).

Overall the method worked excellently, and I integrated it directly into RevFE, so it now has the ability to play videos on a QML surface. This will let me move the video with animated smooth movements, have fading controls as an overlay, and do pretty much anything QML can dream of, to the video surface. Final implementation can be seen here:

https://gitorious.org/revfe/revfe/blobs/master/plugins/mediaengine/videowidget.h

https://gitorious.org/revfe/revfe/blobs/master/plugins/mediaengine/videowidget.cpp

https://gitorious.org/revfe/revfe/blobs/master/revfe/QML/video.qml

These are in git on the master tree, so they may change, but they should be the same files.

ObdTool

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For lack a better name, that’s what I’m calling my software at the moment. All this playing around with libobd and Mode $06 data, and I figured I needed a really good application to actually display the data as I’m parsing it out. ObdToolbox wasn’t a horrible attempt, but looking through it I found it very outdated. It didn’t even work with the latest versions of libobd and would require way too much work to get running again. So I took what I had learned and applied it to a new application, which has come out much better than expected. The application itself is still a work in progress, but it is coming along nicely and there are a lot of really cool features that I’ve pulled over from working with OBD2007 (and some of them, improved).

Main connection screen. This screen displays a good amount of information about both the scan tool, and the vehicle it’s connected to. I like the idea of an overview screen of sorts, just to give you an idea at a glance what’s going on.

 

Same screen, but with the information populated via Chunky_Ks’s wonderful obdsim. I highly recommend it for anyone attempting to do any sort of OBD2/ELM programming. I’ll have to do a post on his application at a later point. As you can see, ObdTool scans the vehicle to see if it supports different Modes.

 

One very interesting feature of ObdTool, is its ability to use QML Gauges. I’ve embedded a QML window within one of the tabs, which reads in an external QML file to display live analog gauges of values. In addition to that, ObdTool can be launched in a touch friendly gauge mode, complete with menu for setting com port and connecting/disconnecting all from a touchscreen.

 

I’ll put a couple more screenshots at the bottom for some of the more interesting features of ObdTool. One of the cool things about programming, is that every time I write an application I learn new things both about my own programming style, and about the language that I’m using. It also provides an opportunity in this case, to learn a lot more about the inner workings of OBD2 and modern vehicles as well. I’ve amassed a good amount of documentation about OBD2 which I’m sure will provide very useful in the future. I’ve posted some of the links below the screenshots at the bottom.

 

 

Here are some links that I’ve found really useful, but weren’t all that easy to find:

GM Mode $06 Information
Ford OBD2 Information
Wikipedia Technical article on OBD2 PIDS