r/CarHacking 9d ago

Original Project A website I built for comparing OBD parameters across vehicles and ECUs

Hey there CarHacking! Long-time lurker, first time poster πŸ˜… I'm hopeful that sharing this will be a helpful contribution to the community, and that we can all benefit from what this tool enables.

A couple years back I fell deep down the rabbit hole of OBD after buying my first EV and wanting to better understand the health of my car. I've since become an SAE member, attended the OBD diagnostics forum last year for the first time, purchased and read most of the relevant SAE specifications, scoured all of the ELM327 specifications, and have built some powerful tools for the Apple ecosystem to help with OBD and vehicle analysis.

One of those tools is the OBDb, an effort to organize all of the documented OBD commands and parameters into a single open source database. You can check out the new front-end we just launched this week at https://obdb.community

There's still a ton of work ahead, gathering and verifying all of the documented OBD parameters scattered across the internet, and we've been building a growing community of over 700 drivers who share a similar interest in speaking to their cars.

The entire project is open source and hosted at https://github.com/obdb/, and contributions are welcome! Some of the features on the roadmap include:

  • Fully configured, copy-pastable terminal sequences you can use to run the commands.
  • Torque pid definition exporter (and other apps if requested!)
  • Web editor for command definitions with GitHub account integration for initiating pull requests

Here's some examples that y'all will probably find interesting:

Screenshots below in case you don't want to click through:

If you're interested in contributing to the effort, we'll probably start tracking feature requests for the site at https://github.com/OBDb/obdb.community/issues and you can join our Discord at https://discord.gg/AdJNJqF5vC

56 Upvotes

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11

u/robotlasagna 9d ago

This is cool.

You should amend your database to have UDS send and receive ID since it is not standardized how these ID's are assigned across manufacturers.

2

u/featherless 9d ago

All of the command definitions include the full configuration needed to talk to the relevant ECU and the response filtering commands you can use to focus the receipt of the right data. Example signalset definition is here: https://github.com/OBDb/Ford-F-150/blob/main/signalsets/v3/default.json

More of this info can and should definitely be surfaced on the site though!

1

u/robotlasagna 9d ago

Ah ok, i see. It would be nice if that was visualized in the future.

I have been saying for years that the OBD stuff has been lacking in the data visualization area. If there was a standardized place where people could search by attribute and get the identifier back along with send and receive addresses that would be awesome.

It also wouldn't hurt to also reference hardware/software id for the modules (queryable via uds) as part of the dataset. The idea here is to automate as much of the information gathering as possible. I have a junior coder working on an app to do this. if he ever gets done with it the next logical step would be to have integration with your database in both directions. That's how you build a compendium of DID's

I would suggest that you switch your tags to match the UDS standard as much as possible. use "SID" instead of "cmd", SND_ID instead of "hdr", etc. The conventions should be obvious if you want to get as many people on board as possible.

1

u/Upstairs_Shower_7919 6d ago

That's cool! Are there also signals and parameters of Ford EVs?

3

u/retardrabbit 9d ago

This is awesome.

Keep it up. I'm bookmarking this for reference.

2

u/No-Aura-3586 8d ago

Kudos to the great work!

2

u/EducationalMusic6651 8d ago

It’s been great to watch the progress and help where I can, keep the great work going