The Raspberry Pi JavaFX In-Car System (Part 1)

As part of my work on embedded Java I'm always on the look out for new ideas for demos to build that show developers how easy it is to use and how powerful.  In some of my recent web surfing I came across an interesting device on eBay that I thought had real potential.  It's called an ELM327OBDIICAN bus diagnostic interface scanner.  It is a small box that plugs in to the service port of a modern car and provides an interface that allows software to talk to the Electronic Control Units (ECUs) fitted in your car.  The one I bought provides a Wi- Fi link and also includes a USB socket for wired connectivity.  Similar products are available that provide a BlueTooth interface, but the various opinions I read indicated that these were not as easy to use.  Considering it cost a little over£30 I thought it was well worth it for some experimentation.

Here's a picture of the device:



And here it is plugged into the service port located near the pedals on my car. 



The only downside is that the orientation of the socket means that you can't see the status lights when it's plugged in (at least not without a mirror).

My initial thoughts were to look at what kind of data could be extracted from the car and then write some software that would provide realtime display of things that aren't shown through the existing instrumentation.  I thought it would also be fun to record journey data that could be post-analysed in much the way Formula 1 uses masses of telemetry to let the drivers know where they could do better.

Since I wanted to use embedded Java the obvious choice of processing unit was the Raspberry Pi.  It's cheap, I have a whole bunch of them and it's got plenty of computing power for what I have in mind.  It also has some other advantages:

• Low power consumption (easy to run off the 12V cigarette lighter supply)
• Support for JavaFX through some nice touch screens from Chalkboard Electronics (so I can go wild with the interface)
• Easily accessible GPIO pins

The last point got me thinking about what other possibilities there were for my in-car system.  Recently my friend and colleague Angela Caicedo did a session at Devoxx UK entitled, "Beyond Beauty: JavaFX, Parallax, Touch, Gyroscopes and Much More".  Part of this involved connecting a motion sensor to the Raspberry Pi using the I2C interface that is also available.  The particular sensor she used is from Sparkfun and uses a very cool single chip solution from InvenSense, the MPC-6150.  This provides 9-axis motion data, which means acceleration and rate of rotation for the X, Y and Z axes as well as a compass sensor that works regardless of the orientation of the sensor.

Having studied physics at university (a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) I vaguely remember that if I combine acceleration data with the mass of the car and things like engine speed I can calculate the horse power of the engine as well as the torque being generated.  Throw that into the mix and this could make a really fun project.

As further inspiration I came across this video recently:



There's also an interesting one from Tesla who use a 17" touch display as their cemtre console.

In the follow up parts to this blog entry I'll detail how the project evolves.