Folks:

i have a (possibly) great idea for a product for manual cars, and i want to try it out on mine first. Nobody's done it yet (possibly for good reason) - it would really help people new to stickshift.
I'd love to share my idea, but i need some help first.
does anyone know if the following information is available through any reasonable interface to the mini's bus:

1) what gear the car is in (N-1-2-3-4-5-6-R)
2) if the clutch is engaged or disengaged, or partially engaged
3)MPH
4) RPM of engine

anyone have any knowledge as to whether i could grab this information through either OBD, or some more conveniant bus interface?

thanks!

 

hook up w/ Andy from ROSS-TECH this would be right up his alley - he is a regular poster here on NAM.

 

A bunch of hobbyists/hackers have reverse engineered the iBus protocols. Have a look here:

http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/HackTheIBus/

BTW, what are you trying to build?

Good luck,

Dave

 

RPM & KMH can be obtained from the obd interface. You can even put the trip meter into test and it will show these results. My guess is you would want to use the obd interface with a computer or pda & capture the info or run a real time display. This all can be done, now for the gear or clutch engagement, maybe Andy could shed some more lite on this for you.

 

All of that information is available through the diagnostic port, however it's not documented anywhere (except RPM and MPH for which there are readily-available OBD-II protocol documents). There may be info like that on one of the other buses but I don't know if it is intelligible by normal humans.

Short answer = no easy way to get what you are looking for.

 

I have someone building me an I-Bus to Serial hardware interface to play with. I've been meaning to check out how to intercept and inject control codes/signals from the I-Bus and I'm just now getting around to it. The Yahoo Group I mentioned earlier has quite a bit of information on what additional information may be gleaned by what passes over the Bus. Let me know if you're interested in one of these interfaces to play with, I can probably get my friend to build a second box.

DaveC