Car Data Capturing For Newbie : OBD II And Arduino, Raspberry

In our previous guide around Raspberry Pi and Car thing, we talked about how to around the car stereo deck aka DIN. In this guide we will talk about car data capturing from your car’s OBD II port and interface easily with Arduino, Raspberry Pi etc at cheap cost. Neither all human has clear idea about car’s OBD II port nor the matter exactly easy. Nowadays it is far easy and dirt cheap to get a ready to use HUD display connected with OBD port. But that is not fibre hardware project. Most importantly, there are car manufacturers and car models which gives huge pain to car data capturing.

Car Data Capturing For Newbie : OBD II Adapters and Cables

There are lot of companies who sells ready to use kits which are towards fibre hardware, like this one :

They are neither cheap nor provides warranty to cover all possible cars. For fully DIY work, you need to know all the basics which are used in your country. The CAN bus is a broadcast type of bus so that all nodes can listen to all the transmissions. The CAN hardware provides a local filtering to listen only to the interesting messages. If you have not understood, we are making it more easy.

Your car has an OBD II port. That port has some standard and manufacturer dependent matters which are clearly discussed here as technical information :

If you use a cable named OBD-II opening cable connector like this one :

You are directly tapping your car. It gives you the room to adjust connector. That cable’s open end will go to a breadboard.

From that breadboard you can covert output as USB or whatever you want. Now there are ready to use shields or rather boards which are specific for Arduino, Raspberry Pi etc which gives that CAN-Bus capability. They usually have a Microchip controller and microchip transceiver. These CAN shields connected normally with OBD-II cable. You can buy the basic electronics components of such CAN-Bus shield and make your own.

Many companies now manufacturers the above things as ready to use DIY solution :

Next part is interfacing, which is nicely written here for Raspberry Pi :

If you prepare the basic hardware matter up to this step, next steps are easier.

Ready To Use Car Data Capturing Via OBD II Solutions

There are kind of closed source OBD II Bluetooth adapters with Android or iOS Apps or HUD display available in the market which essentially does the same work. In case you are failing to retrieve data from your specific model of car in DIY and you can not find and user who did DIY work with the same model of car, you should find in car shop which of those ready to use stuffs work. Essentially you have reverse engineer those hardware and build yours one with robust features.