GPS & OBD-II Logging - Utilising Logs to calculate routes.

Wolfsbane2k · 03-14-2006, 08:55 AM

Hi.

I've been playing with OBD-II readers recently for the purpose of logging the car's characteristics as i use certain routes purely for logging information. At present the GPS location is dumped into a database, and each time i go past that point i dump a OBD-II log into it - this is also time stamped.

This means that for each route i take, i can calculate with known figures a proper MPG per route, actual route speed etc. Main reason is to work out actual costs for driving certain routes.

What i'd like to do is to feed this information back into some GPS software and use it to influence the routing that takes place - ie if the software defaults to a 40mph road when i can use an alternative road that the software has as a 30mph, but i can drive at 60mph, which is also more economical, i'd like to use it. Using the time-stamp, i'd also like to change the route depending on the average speed according to that time of day.

I guess what i'd like is to be able to add additional characteristics to certain roads, and override the default values on others - and then route on those specific characteristics.

Does anything like this currently exist, or will i have to get deep and dirty with the SDKs? I'm not much of a programmer...

Yours,

Wolfsbane2k

millec · 03-14-2006, 03:22 PM

There are a lot of routing packages out there, where you can add the "friction" values to be used when calculating a route. Distance, and time are just two examples of different "friction" values. The flexibe routing algorithms are usually exposed as a part of a commercial GIS package which is usually beyond the means of an average user

Check out www.freegis.org to see if there are any packages out there that will suit your needs. Manifold GIS is pretty cheap too, unfortunately, you will also need a dataset and there isn't much out there that is good that is available for free, and I don't know of any commercial dataset that is available cheap like Mappoint (navtech data), DeLorme products, etc that can be converted into a typical GIS format easily. The TIGER data is the closest thing, and it is pretty poor (although its improving).

Good Luck,
--Craig