automaton is a trip computer for your car. Utilizing breakthrough 1990s technology, it will enable instantaeous visibility into various aspects of your car's performance, such as engine data, fuel efficiency estimates, and speed statistics. In addition, state-of-the-art SD card technology is now enabling the sort of data logging and analysis that bored drivers of the past could only dream about. automaton will undoubtably provide multiple hours of fun to offset the innumerable hours its users spend driving.

The AVR firmware is under heavy development. The hardware design is still preliminary. The PC support programs for data analysis have not been written.

The current implementation is on a breadboard. Once the hardware design is solidified, a PCB version will probably be manufactured.

Vehicles must support OBD-II. Any vehicle made after 1996 is required by law to implement OBD-II. Only certain protocols are actually implemented in hardware. This limitation has not been made because of any fundamental limitation, but rather, to reduce the mountain of hardware needed to support the many mutually incompatible protocols under the OBD-II umbrella.

The STN1110 chip is a universal transceiver, so the addition of support for more OBD-II protocols is limited only by the developer's patience.

Supported protocols:

• SAE J1850 VPW
• CAN (ISO 15765)

Unsupported protocols:

• SAE J1850 PWM
• ISO 9141-2
• KWP (ISO 14230)

Most of these are not yet done.

• Live data via LCD
• Deferred data analysis via SD card and Python scripts
• GPS logging
• Check Engine Light zapper

All hardware is subject to change as project requirements shift.

• Microcontroller: Atmel ATmega324A @ 20MHz (32KB flash; 2KB SRAM)
• OBD transceiver: OBD Solutions STN1110
• Real-time clock: TBD
• GPS module: TBD
• Debug UART: FTDI FT230X (TBD)
• LCD: 4x20 HD44780

This project uses Avery Pennarun's implementation of D. J. Bernstein's redo build system.

To build the automaton AVR firmware program, install redo and simply run redo all. To clean the project directory, run redo clean.

To load the firmware onto the microcontroller, obtain a hardware programmer and run redo load. You will almost certainly need to modify the build script for this to work.

The build script may need to be modified for your system configuration. To do so, you need only edit the default.do file in the project's root directory. As redo uses posix shell scripts, a basic understanding of shell scripting is sufficient to modify the build script to your purposes.

This project is licensed under the terms of the simplified (2-clause) BSD license. For more information, see the LICENSE file contained in the project's root directory.