Whipped Cream Difficulties

I bought a new to me car last Saturday. It’s a 2006 Honda Accord EX-L that had 82,000 miles on it (not bad, in my opinion, for a 12 year old car) and has quite few features I like: leather interior, sun roof, cabin air filter, power seats, and even seat heaters for that one month a year when those are actually useful in Texas. (Also ABS. I’m not clear on whether it has traction control or not. I checked the Honda-Tech VIN decoder and while it is useful, it doesn’t talk about traction control.)

Now that I have the car, I splurged on a couple of things. I got a dashcam for it: the Papago GoSafe 535, which is what the Wirecutter currently recommends. That one has gone up by about $13 in the couple of days since I ordered it, and it really wasn’t my first choice. I wanted the Spy Tec G1W-C, which was a previous Wirecutter choice that I bought for my mother’s car and have been happy with. But by the time I was ready to order, Amazon had sold out of the Spy Tec.

My other splurge item was a LELink Bluetooth Low Energy BLE OBD-II car diagnostic tool. Why? Several reasons:

1. This is the first car I’ve owned with an OBD-II interface. My previous car was a 1990 Honda Accord, which I bought in 2000 with about 87,000 miles on it. (It was, literally, previously owned by a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sunday.) The one before that was a 1983 Accord hatchback that I bought in 1987 and got to 182,000 miles before retiring it in 2000. (It was still running, but the seats were basically down to bare metal and there were other issues. That car was later totaled out after being hit in my apartment complex parking lot by some woman whose boyfriend was teaching her to drive.) I know Accords aren’t exciting or trendy choices, but they will run darn near forever with reasonable maintenance.
2. I would kind of like to get this car close to the same mileage as the 1990 Accord, if not beyond. That one got to 291,000 miles before the head gasket blew: it also needed a new cabin blower motor, which would have been an additional $700 on top of $2,500 to fix the blown head gasket, so…no.
3. Since I would like to get the 2006 Accord to or past that mileage mark, I kind of like the idea of getting real-time engine diagnostics now that I have that capability. In particular, I had a fair number of problems with the 1990 Accord running hot: while it had an analog temperature gauge, it didn’t have a scale on the gauge, so I couldn’t really tell how hot it was getting beyond “halfway up the gauge”, “2/3rds of the way”, and “pegging the needle at the top and the dashboard light is on”. I’m also wanting things beyond engine temperature. Ideally, I’d like to get oil temperature and pressure, battery voltage, estimated range to empty, and both instantaneous and average MPG.

(I remember, when I was younger, my dad installing voltage, temperature, and oil pressure gauges in a couple of our cars. I wonder what he’d think of this setup.)

Why the LELink? Why not something like the Wirecutter recommended Automatic Pro?

• The Automatic Pro is fairly expensive: $130 from Amazon versus $35 for the LELink.
• The LELink is supported by OBD Fusion, which I’ll discuss shortly. I think the Automatic Pro might be as well, but I can’t tell for sure, and it isn’t listed on their recommended adapters page.
• I had a discussion with Automatic support a couple of weeks ago, and they told me the Automatic app did not support the kind of real-time data polling I wanted to do.
• The LELink claims to have a “User configurable auto on/off ZERO power standby mode”. A couple of my friends have also been using other OBD adapters: one of them found that, if he left his car sitting without driving it for a week, the OBD adapter he was using would drain his battery.
• Barring an extremely compelling reason, I don’t buy products that are advertised on podcasts. My only exceptions to this rule have been CrashPlan, which offered a screaming Thanksgiving deal one year on a podcast I no longer acknowledge (and CrashPlan later pulled out of the personal backup business) and Backblaze, which I was already familiar with before they started advertising.

An OBD adapter isn’t sufficient, unless you just want another light that blinks at you periodically. You need some sort of software to get real-time performance data and read the diagnostic codes. (When your car throws up the “Check Engine” light, you go to the mechanic, and they plug in a box and read some code? That’s pretty much the same thing an OBD adapter and software does, except I think the mechanic’s shop pays more for the box.) In my case, I picked OBD Fusion from OBD Software because:

1. It wasn’t Automatic.
2. They don’t advertise on podcasts.
3. It gets good reviews on the Apple app store.
4. It has a feature I really like: the ability to build your own custom dashboard, complete with custom gauge designs. I was, at one point, thinking about writing a similar app for an iPad or Android tablet, but now that I know OBD Fusion exists, I have no need to. (And I never did because I didn’t have a car with an OBD connector to play with.)
5. It runs on the iPhone. There is an Android version available, too.

(There is also an Android app called Torque which is available in a free “lite” version and a paid “pro” version. I’ve heard good things about it, it looks to do many of the same things as OBD Fusion, but I have not tested it myself and don’t have an Android device to test with.)

(There’s also a good discussion of this stuff going on at Borepatch’s place.)

The package arrived on Monday, but I waited until yesterday to install everything. (Hurray paid company holidays!) Findings so far (because, for the moment, this is my own personal wiki):

• I had a heck of a time getting the mini-SD card into the Papago’s slot and making it stick. (The Papago comes with an 8GB mini-SD, but I bought a 32GB card when I ordered it.) I finally had to push it in with the back of a knife handle to get it to stick. I’m hoping I won’t need to remove it any time soon. (Papago claims that you can mount it on your computer or Android phone as a USB mass storage device, and provides appropriate adapters and cables.)
• Once I got the SD card in and the camera plugged into the car, it seems to be working okay. Except that the suction-cup mounting isn’t really reliable. The Spy Tec has a similar problem, though not quite to the same degree as the Papago. Papago also supplies an adhesive-backed mount in addition to the suction cup one, but that raises more issues (ease of removal, how well will it stick) and I’d prefer to stay away from that if I can.
• The OBD connector on a 2006 Honda Accord isn’t located in the fuse box. It’s actually under the dash, above and to the left of the fuse box, and requires some contortions to get at.
• Re the above: I’m too old for this (stuff).
• Once I got the LELink plugged in and started up the car and OBD Fusion, I had no problems connecting and getting data. It kind of just worked, mostly right out of the box. It’s great.
• But: oil pressure doesn’t appear to be available. It looks like this is a non-standard “PID”. (If I understand “PID”s correctly, they are to OBD what SNMP traps are to networks: a way to query and retrieve device-specific data.) It also looks like this may depend on whether your car has an oil pressure sensor installed, as opposed to just a low oil pressure switch.
• Oil temperature reads “0” as well. That is a standard PID, so I’m not sure why it is reading “0”. It may be another PID that depends on the presence of a specific sensor.
• Battery voltage, coolant temperature, speed, and total fuel economy work fine, no assembly required. I have been playing around with the gauge styles and designs, just to improve readability and make them more useful for me.
• Distance to empty also reads “0”. I’m wondering if this requires some level of calibration or manual setup.
• There are a few minor UI things that I’d change or improve. I’d love to be able to copy sample gauges from one dashboard to another, and to have gauges auto-align on a grid.
• I’m halfway tempted to find a used iPad Mini and a car mount, and set that up as a semi-permanent display for OBD Fusion. I think this would give me larger gauges (better visibility) and more of them on a single dashboard. But how well will that hold up in a car, in summer, in Texas?

I’ve got tickets open with OBD Software for some of these issues. I’ll report back on what they have to say.

One thing you might have been wondering about: am I concerned with security? Should you be? As far as I know (I haven’t tried sniffing the traffic) the Bluetooth connection between the LELink and the iPhone isn’t encrypted or authenticated, and OBD goes both ways: you can theoretically use OBD Fusion to reset that “check engine” code or even rewrite some of your car’s parameters. You know, for performance reasons.

I’ve give that some thought. Here’s how I look at it:

1. I’m not a high-value target. Who wants to go after me and my 2006 Accord?
2. You’d pretty much have to be right on top of my car, or have a long-range Bluetooth adapter, to be able to connect.
3. I’m not even sure you can connect and read or write to the OBD interface if the key isn’t in the ignition and turned to “On”.
4. If someone wants to go to that much effort to figure out how hot my engine is running, I probably have other problems.
5. This may very well be one of those things that I explore in more detail as I get deeper into banging on Bluetooth, somewhere down the road. I might very well change my mind.

In the meantime, all this stuff is kind of fun to play with at stoplights. Makes me wish I had a co-pilot.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2018 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Android, Apple, Bluetooth, Bookmarks, Cars, Geek, Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.