OBDII Wifi Dongles?

chunkyks · 09-10-2009, 02:28 PM

All,

I'm looking to expand my OBDII dongle collection to include a wifi dongle, so's I can get obdgpslogger doing its thing with those too.

What are people's experiences with such dongles? Do you have any you specifically recommend? Which ones are most affordable?

As per usual with OBDII stuff, visiting google leaves me traversing a rabbit hole of unrelated things that tend to lead back to the same few pages in the end.

Gary (-;

mgile · 09-11-2009, 12:05 PM

http://plxkiwi.com/kiwiwifi/

The Kiwi WiFi from PLX Devices is the best on the market currently. It's the smallest and cheapest ($149) and has worked flawlessly for me. I've built mobile phone and desktop software around it, as it uses the ELM327 AT command set, making it simple to code for.

OBDKey (http://www.obdkey.com/wifi/index.asp?) also offers a WiFi dongle, but I found that the packaging was too long to be usable, as the case would stick out and hit my leg while driving.

Hope this helps.

-Mike

chunkyks · 09-11-2009, 04:18 PM

Hrm. I hadn't found the kiwiwifi.

I think that if 150 bucks is the cheapest at the moment, I'll hang on a while for the price to drop a bit. Probably just implement a network plugin for obdsim for the fun of it while I wait :-)

Gary (-;

chunkyks · 09-11-2009, 04:20 PM

Am I right in my understanding at a high-level that using the wifi key is as simple as
1) {do wifi hoojery to make stuff able to talk to other stuff}
2) telnet to relevant port on the dongle [port 23, in the case of obdkey?]
3) Talk normal elm327

?

Gary (-;

mgile · 09-11-2009, 04:36 PM

Quote:

Am I right in my understanding at a high-level that using the wifi key is as simple as
1) {do wifi hoojery to make stuff able to talk to other stuff}
2) telnet to relevant port on the dongle [port 23, in the case of obdkey?]
3) Talk normal elm327

More or less, yes, for most of the WiFi devices, the procedure is:

1.) Connect to the 802.11 AdHoc network provided by the device
2.) Open a socket to the IP Address that represents the WiFi scantool, which in the case of the Kiwi, you would connect to 192.168.0.10, port 35000.
3.) Start your ELM327 command cycle (i.e. warm reset, pull protocol, supported PIDs).

-Mike

chunkyks · 09-12-2009, 04:32 PM

Easy enough.

I don't suppose you have a posix-compatible system [ie, OSX, Linux, Solaris] sitting around and a few minutes to try something for me, by any chance?

Gary (-;

mgile · 09-12-2009, 04:42 PM

Sure, I have a Mac and VMs of Vista, Ubuntu and CentOS. What did you want to test?

- Mike

chunkyks · 09-12-2009, 08:07 PM

I just implemented a "Socket" generator for obdsim, which "may" work with wifi OBDII dongles.

To try it:

Code:

svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/obdgpslogger/trunk obdgpslogger
cd obdgpslogger
mkdir build; cd build # Separate build subdir
cmake ..
make
# Drops binaries in "bin" dir in top level checkout
PATH=`pwd`/../bin:$PATH ; export PATH
obdsim -g Socket -s host:port -o

The "-o" on obdsim causes it to launch obdgpslogger attached to the pty it creates. Needs cmake to build, but that's about it for base compilation.

Should work on any posix-ish machine that can address the dongle. All I've been able to do so far is set it up and use it with localhost:echo.

Thank-you! I greatly appreciate it. There's no hurry on this, just whenever you find yourself a few minutes to try it :-)

Gary (-;