Supported Devices

You need to UNinstall the brltty and libbrlapi0.5 (Braille TTY) packages to get ftdi working under Ubuntu.

Ftdi will work out of the box after that. See my HowTo document in the "HowTo" thread.

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Originally Posted by smokeybreeze

You need to UNinstall the brltty and libbrlapi0.5 (Braille TTY) packages to get ftdi working under Ubuntu.

Ftdi will work out of the box after that. See my HowTo document in the "HowTo" thread.

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Smokeybreeze, thank-you so much for finding that!

Gary (-;

Quote:

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Originally Posted by smokeybreeze

You need to UNinstall the brltty and libbrlapi0.5 (Braille TTY) packages to get ftdi working under Ubuntu.

Ftdi will work out of the box after that. See my HowTo document in the "HowTo" thread.

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I don't have these installed unfortunately. I did take a look at your howto and the ftdi module loads just fine. I did unload it and found when doing that that I still had a rogue wine process holding on to it so once I killed that and removed/re-added it the obdgpslogger now connects ok, but I get

Code:

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Didn't get parsable data back for cmd 00:

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and then no pids are recognized. Its a hassle to test this so can't spend time on it right now but I'll look into what the response is later.

charles

Could you start a new thread about your "unparsable response" error? As we were talking on irc, I think I have an answer, but it might need a bit more time on my part.

Gary (-;

will do as soon as I get home. I'll include the serial logging output

I have seen online several less expensive (<$50 US) options for OBD-ii to USB dongles, such as this one:

http://www.eobd2.com/elm327-usbplastic-p-358.html

and this one:

http://www.ecrater.com/product.php?pid=4275758

But I have no experience and can't tell if these devices would work or not. They look like the other devices that are confirmed to work from the online descriptions, to my untrained eyes, but I am wondering why they would be so much less expensive.

Any thoughts?

Should work without problem. So long as they say "elm327 compatible", you should get something out. IME, the more expensive ones perform better and provide more features, but for simple stuff [and obdgpslogger doesn't do anything really "not simple"], those should work fine.

There's been some substantial discussion on the board level above this one a few times about this. Anything that applies to others should apply to obdgpslogger.

Gary (-;

Hi Gary,

I ordered the Scantool.net OBDLink BT/USB device and also need to order a GPS Bluetooth device. In your logger's documentation, you mention you used Globalsat BT-359. Would you recommend this device as it does everything you need or would you choose a different one, if you could do it all over again?

How often do you receive the location from the GPS receiver? I assume this is less-frequent than the rate at which you receive OBD-II information? If this is true, how do you create the log if the two data rates are different? I also assume you receive speed, rpm, etc. at the same data rate, so the number of samples of OBD-II information is the same.

Thanks,
Jared

I'm perfectly happy with my BT-359, as far as bluetooth goes.

I actually don't use it much; I have a BU-353 puck that I'm much happier with. If you specifically want bluetooth, then yes, the bt-359 is great. If you don't specifically need bluetooth, get the linked puck instead.


I sample gps at the same rate as I sample obd; by using gpsd, all the complexities of that are completely hidden. If you set the samplerate to 2 times a second, then it will ask gpsd for your position twice a second... whatever gpsd says your position is, that's what's logged.

And as a heads-up, if you use the wire to plug it into your computer, the OBDLink defaults to 38400 baud while obdgpslogger defaults to 9600.
You'll want to set that in the config file [since I haven't written a baudrate guesser yet]:

Code:

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echo "baudrate=38400" | sudo tee /etc/obdgpslogger

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- I don't have a bluetooth-capable OBDLink, but I suspect that you won't suffer this artifact since rfcomm usually gets it right first time, in my experience.

Gary (-;

Quote:

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Originally Posted by chunkyks

OBD GPS Logger *should* magically work with just about anything that claims to be elm327 compliant.

That being said, I own, and have tested my software with:

0) Note: FTDI devices

OBDGPSLogger magically works with FTDI devices, on Linux out-of-the-box, and OSX after installing the drivers from this website: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm.

On OSX, it creates a device /dev/cu.usbserial-{serial number}, which you would put in the relevant box in the UI or pass to obdgpslogger with the -s parameter.
On Linux the device is probably /dev/ttyUSB{something}

Note: Thanks to Smokeybreeze for this one: FTDI apparently conflicts with brltty on some systems [including Ubuntu 9.04]. If you find that your FTDI-based stuff isn't working, try removing brltty and libbrlapi from your system.

1) OBDPros USB
http://www.obdpros.com/product_info.php?products_id=133

Please see note 0, as this is an FTDI device.

This is the first USB device I got, and it worked perfectly first time with obdgpslogger, without modification.

I don't know how it does it, but empirically it can sample about five times faster than the OBDKey I have.

2) Scantool.net OBDLink
http://www.scantool.net/obdlink.html

This, again, works with FTDI drivers [which is ideal!].

Note that by default, the device I have works at 38400 baud but the FTDI driver on both OSX and Linux sets the default baudrate to 9600 when I plug this device in. OBDGPSLogger takes a "-b" or "--baudrate" option to alter the baudrate on the port after opening it, or you can set it permanently through the .obdgpslogger config file.

...

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Anyone successfully run either 1) or 2) above with cygwin on Windows?

By the way I assume 500K baud rate is OK?

Thanks!