MR2 Owners Club

I've recently bought myself an ST205 chargecooler which I'll refurbish and fit in due course. I'm interested to know what difference it's making to my intake temperatures so am looking to fit a temperature sensor and run it to a car pc which I'll also fit.

Has anyone else got this setup with a car pc? I've had a quick google and found less than I would have expected...

I once went through the car pc fiasco, I see little point now a nexus 7 is cheaper than a middle of the road head unit, there are a range of sensors called phidgets that tie in with an android app, this is what I'll going to be using for my next ice install, plus it's a minimum mod to get a nexus flush mounted into a double din size hole

What temperature do you want to measure? You'll find measuring the temperature of the air coming out really tricky to do in a useful way, as you need pretty fast response times (1s is way too long!)

At the moment I've got this setup, using some generic temperature gauges with the sensors placed in teh coolant pipes going in and out of the chargecooler:



I've got the right fast responding thermistors to place in the outgoing charge air to sense the temperature, but given my displays only refresh once a second there's little point

I am going to try and use this
http://icculus.org/obdgpslogger/

Will let you know how I get on..

@gavs what rev do you have? Sadly us with older revisions don't have obd2 so have to do it all with aftermarket gizzmos, the phidgets are really expensive for what they are but you do get a load of digital io pins which could be use full for switching things on and off from the dash mounted tablet

It's a rev2 with a 2GR and OBD2 compliant ECU.
I have built myself a little ssd based car pc which *should be* small enough to sit in the cubby hole behind one of the seats to do the OBD/GPS bits.

That sounds really cool, keep us posted on how you get on, I'd love to get obd data in my 2

gavsdavs wrote:It's a rev2 with a 2GR and OBD2 compliant ECU.
I have built myself a little ssd based car pc which *should be* small enough to sit in the cubby hole behind one of the seats to do the OBD/GPS bits.

You need to have a look at the Raspberry Pi

HM

Howlin_Mad wrote: You need to have a look at the Raspberry Pi

HM

I suspect it wouldn't have enough IO ports (to do what I want) and also more limited driver support.
Recent linuxes can do this standing on their head and you get useful stuff like ssd trim and flexible networking.

gavsdavs wrote:

Howlin_Mad wrote: You need to have a look at the Raspberry Pi

HM

I suspect it wouldn't have enough IO ports (to do what I want) and also more limited driver support.
Recent linuxes can do this standing on their head and you get useful stuff like ssd trim and flexible networking.

Have a look into it, you'll be surprised

HM

Howlin_Mad wrote:Have a look into it, you'll be surprised

HM

Ok, I'll bite, what can an rpi do that a 'normal' PC can't (as in one with conventional parts and a case). Power draw from the PC I have will be a few (30?) watts, and as it's got a 'in-car' bios which has power controlled by the ignition.

I've seen rpi, but I dont' fancy having to learn python to do stuff when I can use an end user distro on a little PC and get pretty much all software for free without having to write it myself

Watching this with interest... Already bought an RPi for no other reason. That said I struggle to programme an alarm clock so I'm thinking of this as a "long term aspiration"!

I keep thinking of replacing my water temperature gauges with a PIC hooked up to some LED displays - trouble is I know it'd take me ages to get round to actually implementing it! (I'm a software engineer, so the actual programming would be a cake-walk for me though)

My cookbook so far:
Chassis:
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_1388.html
(Has a Car-pc BIOS and is actually a DC PC, no big PSU or inverter nonsense to worry about)

A CPU (can't remember which, 32 bit, low power as this doesn't do anything heavy)
2Gb RAM
120Gb SSD (they're so cheap now and compensate for any failing in the CPU horsepower)
A 4 port USB PCI card.
- An OBD2 USB cable (amazon/ebay)
- A USB GPS (amazon/ebay)
- A USB 3g dongle (get 4g if you can)
- 2 USB wifi dongles (one for base station, one for wifi client)
You will need to look into driver support for all of the above but a recent linux can manage (3.* kernel)

An end user linux will drive all the chipsets above, but you can not use ALL wifi chipsets as the base station. (I'm using fedora 17)
(http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Wireless/Access_point)

You will need to configure
- gpsd (OBDGPSlogger needs this but it's dead easy)
- any network interfaces
- hostapd
- Make sure you are able to catch the power off signal from the BIOS. I nagged the vendor and they gave me something to spot this so I can trigger a graceful shutdown.
- I've also done
- hostapd (the wifi base station bit)
- Caching only nameserver
- DHCP server
- Firewalling/routing
- mail transport (so it emails me any obdgps logs when it shuts down)
- sshd (so I can log into it when it's on the move remotely)

The actual software setup was a doddle, most of the pain was selecting the right products to do the bits you want.

I log into it using either a serial cable or ssh. It doesn't have a keyboard/mouse/screen.

It isn't yet fitted, but will be when it returns from its servicing.
I will post any good traces I get.

Gavs