OBD-II monitor using smartphone and cloud solutions : For ECO driving

Abstract: Fuel consumption of transportation vehicles account for nearly 27% of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel. The environmental impact of of transportation can be lowered with effective ECOfriendly driving. As modern vehicles are equipped with the on-board diagnostics (OBD) system that provides vehicle’s self-diagnostic data which is accessible to from the OBD-II socket in vehicles. The aim of this thesis is to design and implement such a monitor system that consists of an OBD-II reader (containing a Bluetooth communication module) to fetch data from the OBD-II socket and then, via a smartphone, send the data to a cloud server for analysis and visualisation. For this purpose, an ELM327 Bluetooth module (an off-the-shelf OBD-II dongle) was bought, an application has been created for an Android smartphone, and a cloud server has been created using ThinkSpeak (an online solution for cloud data collection and visualisation).   As a result, such monitor system has been implemented at low cost, and then tested and evaluated together with a Toyota Prius driving a round-trip between the Swedish cities of Uppsala and Arlanda. The test results have shown that the system is successful in gathering data from the OBD-II socket and then sending visualizing data. It needs, however, further work to increase the user-friendliness and accuracy of the gathered information from the vehicle.