It's something I've thought about doing in the past but never really pursued until now. I'm looking to build a data logger using my laptop and an ADC (eg 11 channel Pico one) and use it to record things like charge temps, boost pressure, engine speed, throttle position, oil temp, oil pressure etc. Only doing it for interest really and to learn a bit more about my car.

I know there are plenty of race car data loggers (as in Demon Tweeks etc) but wanted to do something that is (a) cheaper and (b) something i can build/program myself.

Just wondering if anyone else on here has done it before?

Cheers
Jim

 

Any other boffins aboot?

 

Where did you get the ADC?
Does it have a serial port and software for the PC?
Cost?

You can use the Delta Dash which connects directly to the ECU port of data lgging is what you are after.

 

Jimmy,

Check out the Delta Dash/EcuTek stuff in Drivetrain and on www.ecutek.co.uk. The guy is Stephen Done and he's spent nearly a year getting it up and running.

Unless you're a whizz with an oscilliscope (which is how Steve did it), you may have some trouble getting your laptop to talk to the ODB port as it uses a rather strange protocol.....

Good Luck m8,

Matt

 

Well, the ECUTECK stuff looks very impressive. I must admit that I hadn't appreciated you could interrogate the ECU in quite this way to record all the data! More reading required then! Well, what did you expect: I'm a mechanical engineer so I'm used to spanners and hammers!

I was planning to use my own transducers and route them into an ADC on my laptop and use that for the datalogging and produce something very similar to what's on offer from Ecutek.

The ADC I had in mind was something like the Pico ADC 11 which has 11 analogue input channels and 1 digital output and connects straight onto the 25 pin printer port. It costs about £100 for the 10 bit version which certainly give enough resolution for what i was planning. This ADC also comes with it's own data logging software including graphing functions and variable sampling frequency.

Right, will investigate this a bit further me thinks!

Jim

 

Jimmy

Can't you still do what you planned, only intercept the original sensor signals prior to processing by the ECU. I believe they are mostly analogue voltage values ? Lamda, MAF, TPS & MAP certainly are.

Andy

 

Andy,

Yes, that was my next thought. Piggyback off the existing sensors which would be much neater.

Really like the look of the EcuTek system, but I've got a 96 Impreza Turbo and it doesn't look like they do one for that. Still, I've got plenty to learn since I haven't played with electronics or software for a few years. Better engage brain...

Jim

 

Anyone can tell if the diagnostic port is OBD-II compatible ???

If so there are few cheaper options than the Delta Dash.
Like http://www.obd-2.com/ or http://www.ghg.net/dharrison/obdscan.html .

 

Dukas,

It depends on MY. Anything before MY01, the OBD port is not OBD II compatible, so the "generic" OBD II software will not work with it (and I have tried ). MY01's > are compliant so you can use the OBD II software but to be honest, it's so slow it's not really good for anything other than basic checking of sensor values and Fault Codes. It's way to slow for decent datalogging which is where EcuTek comes into it's own - it can do something like 200 frames per second as opposed to OBD's 2 or 3 fps

Hope this helps,

Matt