Saturday, January 10, 2015

Gasoline Usage in your Car, the tools I use

You can learn a lot about gasoline usage in your car by, well, by logging gasoline usage in your car under a variety of conditions.  You can then analyze the logged results and figure out an astonishing amount of stuff!

In this post I just list the tools I use for getting results.  Following posts will show some of those results.

The Hardware


This is what I use.  It plugs into your OBD2 connector.  On my cars, this is located somewhere near where the hood release for the car is located, under the dashboard on the left side of the steering wheel.

The Software


Torque Pro is available for Apple and Android, I use the Android version.  Torque Pro has amazing real time gauges for displaying many things it can read from your car.  For this work, the real time displays are not so important.  What is important is the ability to log these data into spreadsheets, which spreadsheets can then be opened and analyzed later.  

After I have the spreadsheets of logged data from my driving runs, I write scripts in Matlab to do the analysis.  I have used Matlab for decades in my job.  It is a powerful and complicated tool.    

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