Picked up all the components to do some minor datalogging in my STi. I went with the cheap components for now just to get a quick idea of everything before I went and dropped the money on the quality stuff. I already had the Samsung tablet so I picked up the cheapo Chinese OBD bluetooth sender (ELM__) for about $20 on ebay, grabbed a quick seat belt bolt, goose-neck mount for the tablet for around $15-$20 or so, and bought the paid version of the Torque App for the tablet for $5. I’m actually pretty happy so far with how everything is working. There are only a few issues I have; one is that after 10-15min or so the parameters all seem to freeze. Not sure if its due to the cheap chinese OBD sender or if its just a setting in the app. Another thing is that I wish it had a few more parameters. I really was hoping to get real time oil pressure, oil temperature, and fuel pressure, but those don’t appear to be OBD on my 04. And finally, I wish the mount was a little sturdier. I am going to be modifying it to make it a little easier to remove (possibly a quick-release type setup) and I’ll see if I can’t possibly do something to help keep it from shaking at the screen and make it a little sturdier.
I have the Scantool OBDLink adapter that I may also try out, but it is the USB connection version and I wanted to stay wireless… we’ll see what happens though. Eventually I’d like to pick up the Tactrix cable and be able to do some real monitoring and datalogging on the tablet if I can. But for now, the Torque app allows me to datalog whatever parameters I choose, then it will send it in .csv file and create a formatted Excel document. I can also choose how frequently it logs (1/4 second, 1 second, etc). So far it seems to be pretty awesome.
Here are some pictures… sorry about the glare, I’ll try to get some better ones later. Also, I know that the torque/horsepower calcs arent accurate, but I put those displays along with the 1/8mile, 1/4 mile, 0-60, and 40-60 displays on there just for shits and giggles and b/c I had some extra space on the screen that I figured I might as well use up and get some laugs.
Over-all installed shot:
Main dashboard screen:
Additional Parameters screen:
It allows for up to 7 screens, but I only had enough parameters to fill up the 2… lol. The torque app also has a ton of other options including graphing, mapping, DTC reading and clearing, and quite a bit more. Not bad at all for a $5 app. In reality, once the “new gadget” enjoyment time has expired, I’ll probably use it very rarely to do some quick logging (possibly if I get into Autocrossing this year… or maybe the 1 or 2 times I may take it to the valley for some straight line “fun”), but it will probably mainly get used to help with diagnostics… like it did when I had the issues with the o2 sensor earlier.
