Thread: wstar's Journal
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Old 04-27-2009, 11:50 AM   #49 (permalink)
miguez
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Originally Posted by wstar View Post
Well, I happen to be a coder, too, but honestly it sounds like a lot of work, and I don't think Magden's box is very open to modding anyways.

If you want to go that route, it would probably be easier to install a generic Car-PC and use open GPS and OBD-II software with, as you said, a really good GPS receiver. However, I'm not sure if you'll find any generic open hardware interfaces to write software against for high-speed data acquisition that talks our Nissans' CAN protocol. The low-speed generic OBD-II updates are too slow for some gauges (like RPM warnings).

I'm really looking for something more turnkey this time around (well at least, more turnkey than writing my own software).

The more I think about it though, I rarely use GPS. I have a small Garmin Nuvi unit I occasionally stick on the window, I may just stay with whipping that out when necessary and just hook up the Magden unit to the LCD alone and avoid a lot of complexity.
Yep, that last paragraph is definitely true, and the easiest solution. I know nothing of the Nissan CAN protocol or OBD-II, although I am sure the latter could be learned online. The former might be tricky.

That would be an awesome piece of hardware (with software) to have in the car, though, huh? A screen to tell you all kinds of parameters being read from the car, and to provide GPS data. Throw in a 3-axis accelerometer and you can do your own acceleration, braking, skid pad, speed traps, etc. testing, all in one. I imagine there might be a decent market for that.

Hmmm, off to look for Nissan's CAN protocol. The guys at UpRev figured it out, I wonder how. Do you have more info on it?
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