Announcing the PriusChat OBDII Phone App Project

As an registered iPhone app developer, the answer is no. You cannot download it from any other place except the iTunes store. Of course you can anything with jail braked phones.

 

Bonjour,

I had a contact with Brennan from the above link.
I signed a NDA with him, but I can write down, after looking shortly to some of his sources, that:
It should be possible to speak efficiently with the prius using his device.
with his device, it seems possible to manage multiframe responses. (necessary to get SoC for instance).

Here is a starter howto get some infos from prius gen3.

I have no experience with dev on Ipad, but I wrote some programs in VB (with CANUSB, ELM327 & TACTRIX OP2 as interface) using the infos in the above pdf and I will share my small knowledge with pleasure...
My idea would be to show the ipxx 's screen on my new HU using a spare video input... .

 

Grain of salt here.

FWIW, I'm a game developer (VP Technology actually), have been working on the iPhone for the past 2+ years.

First, Mr. Apple forbids putting any reference to their libraries publicly.
Second, it's preferable to have some liberal licensing. All licensing support adding exceptions, so even GPL can be possible, but I'd recommend against it for simplicity.
Third, with the 4.2 now up, iPad app would be very fun, since it can run in the background ^___^ Most dangerous thing we could do is to actually make a iTunes controller with signals, like song playing as long as you press gas, and horrible horrible stuff like that

I don't have a lot of time on my hands, but I have quite a lot of hands-on experience on iPhone and iPad, Obj-C, and even more on coding or app design in general, if you need help, feel free to throw me a PM.

 

I intersected the short list of "popular open source licenses with broad community support" from that link with the FSF's list of open source licenses that they consider compatible with the GPL. That left really only the new BSD and the MIT X11 licenses (listed as compatible with GPL v2 and GPL v3) and the Apache license 2.0 (compatible with GPL v3 only).

Choosing a GPL-compatible open source license gives us some flexibility if we happen to discover a really good existing project to piggyback on that happens to be GPL licensed. The result in that case would be GPL licensed, but if the alternative were to have to pass up good quality work and re-do it all, probably nobody wants to work that hard.

As it happens though, my brief search only turned up three existing projects for OBD-II and Android, and all three use the Apache license 2.0.

The unitsofmeasure code that I would definitely want to use is under the new BSD license, which is pretty much compatible with anything.

So we could probably choose Apache or BSD and be fine, and manage to avoid GPL after all since it doesn't seem as if there's much existing GPL work we would want to use.

Of the three Android apps I found so far, one is moribund; the other two have some activity and some possibly usable example code; neither looks anything like complete. They both pretty much use hardcoded PID and conversion information instead of user-loadable tables which we'll certainly want.


Does anybody have a preference between svn and git for version control? If not I'll flip a coin.


This will be for down the road, but eventually the app will need to be digitally signed. Any signing certificate can be used during testing, but the one used for ultimate signing should probably belong to someone officially connected to priuschat.com, who should also probably set up a "priuschat" Android developer account to be the proud papa of the app. (I'll probably make my own developer account just to play in, but a priuschat account sounds right for publishing the app.)

The priuschat signing certificate needs to have a lifetime to at least end-2033 and will have to be kept well backed up and its passphrase kept very private - anybody who knows it could create fake versions of a priuschat app that did Bad Things, and that would hurt business. Development can be a great community project, but it will be up to the keeper of the priuschat name (and passphrase) to decide when it's ready for the priuschat signature. I can help with the certificate generation but I shouldn't just generate it for you (cos then I'd know it!).


By the way, I assume there are already good collections of PID specs for NHW20 and ZVW30 like what Graham and Vincent worked out for NHW11. Can somebody point me to them? Are they in XGauge tables in a forum thread somewhere, or in some other form?

Enough for now, -Chap

 

Just popped in to say: GO TEAM GO!

Can't wait to use something like this on my new iphone4

 

svn please

 

I personally use SVN for most of my projects, but GIT works well when you have >20 people working on the project, as you can get info from more than one source that's usually online. Speed diff isn't that incredible that said.

My suggestion is to take any certificate really for the first part of the dev, once the project is well under way and starts to see results, then it becomes a good idea to get that said "real" certificate. Or else, it's only money spent too early.

Same for iOS ... I mean I have my own personal certificate for my products, and if PriusChat wants to have an official product, there's no need to spend $100 on something that might be useful in 6-12 months (and since the subscription is yearly, it'd be a $100 down the drain.


Saka

 

Interestingly, Android devices are perfectly happy with a self-signed cert. They're not using it to prove that you're a particular person known to a CA, but only to verify that if you supply an app update you're the same person who originally signed the app, or that two of your apps should be allowed to share a sandbox if you request it. I'm not sure yet just what I think of their model, but at least it doesn't require you to spend any money on a cert.

An argument might even be made for opening the Priuschat market account right away, making a cert, and publishing the official PriusChat Hello World app, just to stake a claim. Then the cert's already associated with PriusChat apps when used later to sign a more interesting app.

-Chap

 

Not to deter any efforts made here, but here's my solution.

 

@pEEf: that's very cool.

@*: a name for this project? sourceforge has a short-phrase-style name and also a 15-character filename-style name. And a description.

PriusChat OBD-II Mobile Apps would fit for the full name, and the automatically suggested short name comes out priuschatobd-ii which is ok I guess.

Will that make it sound too Prius-specific? I'm thinking of writing a description along the lines of "with an emphasis on accessing the specialized performance and diagnostic information in hybrid and other advanced vehicles, with loadable definitions to support new parameters and codes as they become known." Which should make it appealing to owners of other hybrids and some non-hybrids too.

I'm of two minds about the project name - benefit of associating the project closely with priuschat, possible cost of suggesting to non-Prius folks that it's not of interest to them too? What do you think?

And if you would suggest a different name, what would it be?
<brainstorm>
obdchat?
"OBD-II Mobile Apps from PriusChat"?
...?
</brainstorm>

-Chap

also, I'm still wondering (maybe it got buried earlier in the thread) - where do I find the currently known PID information for NHW20s and ZVW30s? Where do scangauge owners go to find those and program xgauges?

 

"hybridview"
"hybridmon"
"stealthmon"
None of the above have anything related to the Prius or hybrid cars on the first page of google search

"stealthview" brings up some night vision equipment...

 

CAN codes for NHW20:

http://www.vassfamily.net/ToyotaPrius/CAN/PriusCodes.xls

XGauge (CAN-bus) for Dummies... - Page 4 - CleanMPG Forums

 

I don't know but let's see what I can find ....

Renaming a project

...

• Follow the provided instructions. The rename operation will then be queued up and performed on all of the necessary servers.

Please note that changing the UNIX name for your project will change the location of your project -- the URLs to access your project on the SourceForge.net site, and the URLs and hostnames for things like CVS, Subversion and your project web site, will all change.
​

... it just seems tidier to pick the name first ....

-Chap

 

With the usual diffidence in plugging my own suggestion, what did you think of obdchat? Not vehicle or propulsion specific, still manages to sneak in a -chat, and in a plausible way (I mean, it is going to chat with those pesky ECUs, after all).

-Chap

 

Great! Have the authors of either of these files said anything about licensing they would accept for incorporating the stuff in an open source project?

I don't seem to be allowed at the second file without a CleanMPG registration ... would the author of that one object to a copy being made where others could see it?

-Chap

 

Steve Woodruff (AutoBeYours.com), has an OBDII app for the android, for the Gen 2 Prius, reads and clears Prius specific error codes as well, and has fancy gauges.

He is using a Bluetooth OBDII dongle. He's also a member of Priuschat (imwoody36), perhaps he'd be interested in guiding the effort, although he is selling his android solution for about $159 with the BT adapter.

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