Telemtry System

Well my FSAE team(UTA) is interested in putting a telemtry system on our car for competition and testing... we have all of the sensors and everything but we can't seem to come up with a good solution for getting the wireless link from car -> computer. IIRC the port coming off of our ECU is serial, but I could be wrong. The longest range we would be dealing with would be a typical autox course all line of site.

Any ideas?

No suggestions, but tell Dr. Bob I said hi. :wink:

(I'm a graduate of UTA's undergrad ME program)

Have you looked on the internet anywhere for any pro-level teams using a type of wireless transmitter for their telemetry? I think if you found one of those systems, you might get some ideas.

ecu serial port >carputer/stripped laptop >wifi > to laptop back in the pits?

Probably weight and power would be the issue. You could strip a FIA mini board down to nothing, with a laptop drive and a usb wifi connector. These are small and light, typically used in POS (that's point of sale) systems. Is there 12v power onboard?

There are also plenty of places that sell small mag mount wi-fi antennas that would greatly extend the range.

You can also look at large flash cards - in the 2 to 4 Gb ranges to use instead of a hard drive if you are worried about vibration & shock problems. There are several folks on eBay that sell adapters to convert those to a standard hard drive connector.

I did do some searching out on http://www.sourceforge.net but didn't see any direct packages out there in the open source community. They do have telemetry packages but those are for model airplanes & rockets... Nothing listed specifically for taking OBD-II interface data and transmitting it to another machine.

I suppose you could go cheap and just put a small PC in the car and use Windows Remote Desktop support or VNC to connect to the PC from the pit lane area and operate it over the wireless link. ;)

RJ