Ideally where I want to get to is to have an on board screen, with a few stats telling me how things are going, and also having an automated process through which I can wirelessly post all data to my web server, so I can make myself a few screen savers that are generated automagically with all that infoporn. Ok, yeah, I'm joking about that screen saver bit. Not sure yet what I'd want to do with that data, but I think I might have a few pointers for some interesting stuff

Turns out that since 1996, any car sold in the U.S. must be OBD2 compliant. Europe has it's own standard, and I bet other countries do as well

A few years ago, all the available options out there was an OBD-pin to Serial cable, and good luck in finding a non-propietary app that would help you extracting all that. Today, there's quite a number of different options. If I wanted to go really low level and build everything from scratch, maybe playing around with Arduino based OBDuinoInterface would be the way to go, but I don't really want to spend too much time writing my own protocols. Too much can go wrong there for me ;P.

Another Option would be one of these OBD 2 USB scanners, but good luck running that on OSX, and besides the last thing I'd want to do is to have a full-fledged laptop running in my car all times. Way more interesting are these two OBD to Wifi interfaces: OBDKey and Kiwi Wifi, that simply create a wireless cloud around your car, to which you can connect through your iPhone or Android phone, and run one of the many apps out there.

The good side of those two wifi based ones is that, there's already a few apps that'd do all that data logging for you, but oh-boy, they look so ugly. More to their credit, they offer an SDK (for $30 bucks) that you can use to write your own apps. However, thinking about the process that I'd have to go to connect my phone to the ODB network running in my car, and reading reviews about those two options, as geeky and awesome as they sound, it just doesn't sound like a fail proof, always-on option to go with.

So I just ordered myself one of these guys:

Go Point Technology's goLINK.

GoLink even has a free app that does pretty much everything I'd want an app like that to do, but it still looks a bit messy. And also, there's nothing like baking your own cake.

Thinking about how insanely busy I am with my new gig (more on that soon), I doubt I'll have much time to play around with all this, but I think I'd like to keep it in the back burner, just in case I suddenly find myself with a few minutes to kill between fancy compile processes.