I’ve always been curious to understand what goes on inside machines. The biggest one I have is my car, so I have been looking for a compact tool to see the traffic on the vehicle CAN bus and do something cool with it for a while now.

Tired of waiting, I decided to make the Carloop, a compact OBD-II diagnostic port shield for the Particle Photon and soon Electron) with GPS support. I first showed it in this forum thread.

To be clear, this is a development kit to connect a Particle device to your vehicle’s OBD II port. You will need to write some code to make this do something. I already gave you a head start by contributing to writing a CAN bus driver for the Particle.

I’m looking for find interested people to try it out. I’ll do a sample production run with that first round of orders and ship them. Several people, including @Bspranger, @avidan and @alterschw3de have already expressed interest in buying one.

If you’d like to see what’s going on inside your car, analyze your driving data and build cool apps, give it a shot!

Go ahead with questions or comments.

Julien Vanier

Engineer, father and geek

Update: this project used to be called CANdlestick