The package from Freematics in Austrailia came in yesterday. I’ve never messed with an Arduino before but the process was simple. Windows 10 automatically had the drivers set to COM3. Step by step instructions here if you need them. Then I installed the Base IDE/firmware. After that, I plugged in the arduino, opened the blink example and clicked “upload”. Within 10 minutes of opening the box, I had the thing up and running.

After staring around for a while and wondering if I had to code all this from scratch, I found the example library for the OBD2 adapter for most of their setups. Once uploaded, I plugged it into my 2007 Subaru 2.5i and got this:

It’s technically erroring for some reason and I still haven’t figured out why. The datalog was empty in the SD card but it did register that it worked. I decided to just give it a go on the LS2 E30.

Hey it looks like something! The SD card logs, I get a GPS/gyro signal and it’s powered by the OBD2 port. Since my OBD2 port is on a toggle switch, I can turn it on and off at any point during my drive and start to log. Latency seems really good too but I haven’t had too much time to test it out yet.

The next goals for the project is to get it to log what I want, change the data display to something that I actually care about, and a special secret for next time. The long term goals will be to hook in a secondary IO shield (arduino talk for a stacked board) so that I can feed in external sensors to be logged. I’m not sure how that works since I don’t know what pins the screen uses and whether or not I can even use more boards with this. I’d also like to use the last open serial port on the screen shield for a secondary GPS or 6 axis accelerometer to gather slip angle data.