Gas mileage / Oil Change tracking

TinSoldier · 08-23-2007, 03:52 PM

I am not a programmer and I am interested in a Gas mileage tracker / Oil Change tracker that could work with Street Deck.

I would be willing to pay about $20-25 for this mod. If done right others might be interested in it as well.

I would love to see something that you would input your mileage and gallons at each fillup, and it would then show your MPG as well as like an AVG MPG between the last 5-10 fillups. Then it would also tell you when your next oil change is due. Then have all that be able to upload to a blog or FTP to show on my truck blog.

Thank for reading this.

jcrumpton · 08-23-2007, 09:36 PM

I'm working on this now. I have an app that I wrote for Windows Mobile, I just have to redo the UI using the Streetdeck com model. You enter the odometer, gallons, and price at each fill up. It gives you MPG and fuel cost per mile for each tank and total. You can also enter brand, grade, and station location if you want to track differences between brands/grades.
It also has reminders for maintenance items, but they are hard-coded for my car, so I need to add some config screens for that.
I also want to have it auto-display the "add fillup" screen when you fill up... based on input from the OBDII interface.

Also have another one working (very early stages). Using the OBDII interface, I want to display speed, injector duty cycle, and throttle position in realtime. With speed and duty cycle you could calculate an instantaneous MPG...

RedGTiVR6 · 08-24-2007, 10:02 AM

this would be a great digitalmod to have.

I hope you can continue this through to completion!

S4Per · 08-26-2007, 09:53 AM

Quote:

I hope you can continue this through to completion!

second!

jcrumpton · 08-28-2007, 07:36 AM

Does anyone know if you can access the OBDII data through the SD object model or do I have to open a seperate connection the the COM/USB port?
Ideally, I want this to automatically fill in the Odometer reading for each fill up. I also want to auto-display the "Add New FillUp" sceen any time the fuel level increases by more than 25% or something like that... not sure that the fuel level is even accessible through OBDII.

TinSoldier · 08-28-2007, 10:15 AM

I have to track mileage for work, and this could be used for that as well. Or an even simpler real quick mod if someone wanted to slap it together for me.

I need to know the job, start miles, and end miles. Then be able to print them by day or email them daily to my email.

That would be super swell. :-D

TinSoldier · 08-28-2007, 10:45 AM

Also, something similar was done by someone else.

http://www.touchcar.com/Products.aspx

However it does not seem to function as easily as it would in SD.

EagleTG · 08-28-2007, 08:40 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by TinSoldier

Also, something similar was done by someone else.

http://www.touchcar.com/Products.aspx

However it does not seem to function as easily as it would in SD.

That one looks nice, but looks like it requires you to enter the miles that you got out of a tank. I found one for the Palm back in the day that allowed you to enter the current odometer reading on each fill-up, it would automatically calculate the mileage change from the last fill-up. It would also use the total gallons to full on the 2nd (and subsequent) fill-ups to determine the mileage. Made it easy, as there was no need to mess with the trip odometer. The only draw-back was that it wouldn't provide results until the 2nd fill-up.

Basically, it asked for the following at each fill-up, if I remember correctly:
Date (assumed to be today)
Odometer Reading
Gallons
Price (Total Sale Amount)

It calculated the price per gallon, etc. from the entered data.

It was called AutoBase, and it was the BEST mileage tracker I've ever used. It was astoundingly well written and thought out. I want to make something similar for the CarPC. I have a friend who is a programmer, I might see if I can commission him to make something.

Unfortunately, I can't find any good screen shots of it... this is the best I could find:
http://www.palmblvd.com/software/pc/...2-palm-pc.html

TinSoldier · 08-28-2007, 08:56 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by EagleTG

That one looks nice, but looks like it requires you to enter the miles that you got out of a tank. I found one for the Palm back in the day that allowed you to enter the current odometer reading on each fill-up, it would automatically calculate the mileage change from the last fill-up. It would also use the total gallons to full on the 2nd (and subsequent) fill-ups to determine the mileage. Made it easy, as there was no need to mess with the trip odometer. The only draw-back was that it wouldn't provide results until the 2nd fill-up.

Basically, it asked for the following at each fill-up, if I remember correctly:
Date (assumed to be today)
Odometer Reading
Gallons
Price

It calculated the price per gallon, etc. from the entered data.

It was called AutoBase, and it was the BEST mileage tracker I've ever used. It was astoundingly well written and thought out. I want to make something similar for the CarPC. I have a friend who is a programmer, I might see if I can commission him to make something.

Unfortunately, I can't find any good screen shots of it... this is the best I could find:
http://www.palmblvd.com/software/pc/...2-palm-pc.html

Yep that is pretty much what I was looking for also. Would be sweet!

jcrumpton · 08-29-2007, 09:26 AM

I should have screenshots in a day or so. The dev environment has been a bit of a learning curve. I've found it is MUCH simpler to implement as a .NET addin, rather than trying to build the UI in SD.
You enter the odometer reading, it calculates the mileage. Eventually, I will have it fill in the odometer reading via the OBDII interface, but not there yet...
Enter the amount of fuel, and either the total fuel cost or the cost per gallon... it calculates the other.
You can optionally also enter the fuel grade, brand and station location.
You can configure it for gallons/liters, dollors/euros/pounds, miles/kilometers, MPG/KPL/Liters(/100 Kilometers), and preferred fuel grade.
The items that it tracks for you are: fuel economy (average and last tank), distance per tank (average and last tank), and fuel cost per mile/kilometer (average and last tank).

I used AutoBase for a couple of years (until i switched to Windows Mobile)... great product.

TinSoldier · 08-29-2007, 06:57 PM

Can't wait to try it out.

Will it be hard to add a way to track miles driven for different jobs I do and generate a monthly report on it?

jcrumpton · 08-29-2007, 09:23 PM

When I get this one up and running, I'll tweak it a bit for job tracking. To me, the seem like completely seperate apps... you don't want to make fill up entries for each job.
The trickiest part will be emailing/printing, and formatting the report.

parksgm · 08-29-2007, 11:05 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by jcrumpton

I should have screenshots in a day or so. The dev environment has been a bit of a learning curve. I've found it is MUCH simpler to implement as a .NET addin, rather than trying to build the UI in SD.
You enter the odometer reading, it calculates the mileage. Eventually, I will have it fill in the odometer reading via the OBDII interface, but not there yet...
Enter the amount of fuel, and either the total fuel cost or the cost per gallon... it calculates the other.
You can optionally also enter the fuel grade, brand and station location.
You can configure it for gallons/liters, dollors/euros/pounds, miles/kilometers, MPG/KPL/Liters(/100 Kilometers), and preferred fuel grade.
The items that it tracks for you are: fuel economy (average and last tank), distance per tank (average and last tank), and fuel cost per mile/kilometer (average and last tank).

I used AutoBase for a couple of years (until i switched to Windows Mobile)... great product.

Would more sophisticated analysis be difficult to implement? For example, since speed can be determined from the GPS, could the app calculate "highway miles" as all miles traveled above 55mph for at least a certain duration of time, and "city miles" as miles under that limit, and then give a highway/city mpg estimate?

The OBD integration sounds wonderful...but why not just calculate the miles traveled from the GPS track?

onidragon · 08-29-2007, 11:34 PM

Subscribed

jcrumpton · 08-30-2007, 08:39 AM

That's a great idea. The advantage to using the ODBII interface is that it would only have to be done each time you fill up... retrieve and store the current odomoeter from the car's ECU, then calc distance between this reading and the previous. If I use GPS data, the process would have to be running continually in the background... to record distance and speed every few seconds or so. I have some concern about a via boards performance... The detailed analysis of % of this tank that was burned at < 50MPH vs over would be really nice though.
Does the GPS system record a track? Where and what format, etc? If it's already storing the track for me, then it would be easy enough to use that data.