Perl OBD-II Logger / News: Recent posts

Let me get right to the point of this post; If you are constructing a Raspberry Pi assembly for the purpose of running Perl OBD-II Logger in "headless" mode that is based on the new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, I strongly recommend that you install the Raspian Wheezy image, which is dated 2015-05-05 at the time of this writing. Raspian Wheezy works just fine on the newest RPi 2 Model B. I have been running it on mine without any problems for a few weeks now, and Wheezy still gets all the regular security related updates. (Raspian Wheezy will fit on 4 GB or larger SD cards).... read more

Release 0.03 of Perl OBD-II Logger is now available for download.

Here is a brief summary of the major changes in this release, see the file "Changes" in the software distribution for a more detailed list;

1. When running pobd_logger on the Raspberry Pi (using the provided SYSV init scripts), the fake hwclock data was not getting updated if the system was shutdown by simply removing power. On the next boot, the clock started at the exact same time as the previous boot, and the PID log files could easily get corrupted (as the log filename, derived from the date/time, usually was the same). To address this problem, I added some code to the run_pobd_logger script to periodically update the fake hwclock data.... read more

Release 0.02 of Perl OBD-II Logger is now available for download.

This release corrects a mistake in the pobd_logger logic for the handling of low level I/O. The problem did not seem to be an issue with USB scantools, but for bluetooth scantools, it sometimes caused pobd_logger to crash when it really should not have.

Collecting OBD-II Mode 0x01 PID data is not very interesting in itself, it's what you can learn from the data that makes the endeavor worth the effort. This release takes a small step in that direction and includes a new Perl program named fuel_economy for post-processing log files written by pobd_logger. It extracts the data for PIDs 0x0d, 0x10 (vehicle speed and mass air flow rate respectively), and outputs estimates of the instantaneous and average fuel economy statistics in formats that can be plotted with a spreadsheet or dedicated plotting programs such as Gnuplot.

Release 0.01 of Perl OBD-II Logger is now available for download.

Since this is the first public release of the software, a little background information is in order. Like most open source projects, this one came about because the author had an "itch" and decided that it needed "scratching".

In late 2010, I did a survey of open source software for logging OBD-II Mode 0x01 PID data, and also evaluated a few commercial offerings. I was more than a little disappointed with what I found.... read more