Internet of Things? What about the Internet of Cars? It’s actually rather surprising how slow the auto industry is in developing all new vehicles to be connected to the net from the get go. Well if you can’t wait, you can always hack. [John Reimers] shows us how to use an Electric Imp combined with OBD-II to remotely monitor your vehicle.
Using the ever venerable OBD-II port on your vehicle (think USB for cars if you’re not familiar), you can pull all kinds of information off of your vehicle’s engine. Fuel economy, temperatures, load, timing, error codes, etc. There are many devices out there to do this for you, from auxiliary gauges like the ScanGauge II, to bluetooth OBD-II dongles which can send the data to your phone. Or you can build your own.
[John] is using an Electric Imp Amy breakout board to interface between a GPS module, the OBD-II connection, and an accelerometer. It can then combine engine data with a GPS signal to be tracked in real-time online. Unfortunately, that does mean you either need a dedicated WiFi hotspot in your vehicle, or must use your phone.
Putting it all together, you’ll be able to monitor your car in real-time in Google Earth, monitor fuel economy on trips, or spy on a loved one, er track your vehicle from going anywhere suspicious.
This is of course if you’re not afraid of the whole Jeep hack fiasco that happened recently…
Filed under: car hacks
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