Has anyone ever been able to use CarMan with a USB OBD-II Interface rather than bluetooth? What I'm going for is to build my own OBD interface (as seen on Hack-A-Day) and use a serial to USB converter to connect the interface to my N800.

Thanks in advance.

I haven't, but am doing something similar (but via bluetooth).

1. Any serial-bluetooth converters should work as well if not better than USB.
2. It probably needs the ELM-327 command set (obdpros.com has a compatible version, but the ELM-5 is the standard).
3. CarMan would just need its serial port pointed at the USB interface instead of bluetooth (with the appropriate usbserial, cdc_acm, etc. modules in the kernel).

Could anyone please explain in detail how to convince CARMAN to use /dev/ttyUSB0 ?

I'm also looking for this... shouldn't there be a carman wiki entry that describes this or something? (if anyone's actually got it working that is). I don't see why it wouldn't be possible, but I haven't poked through the carman source to hack it up just yet. My assumption would be that you'd have to bypass all the BT setup junk and just manually set the device that carman tries to communicate over somehow.

I'm trying to go one step further and shunt the data over a TCP socket connection instead, since I've got a CarPC running in my Jeep that's connected to the ODBII via USB so that it can monitor the vehicle speed/etc; my plan is to write an app that runs on the carPC that will accept signals from both Carman and a local app so both programs can get the vehicle data as required...

Ive been trying to do this myselfI have carman setup on my N770 and When I plug the USB ELM327 into the N770 its detects it and gives address5 (shown in dmesg).

What I need now is to emulate a bluetooth device with the USB device, Or modify carman to look at all com ports.

Last Option im willing to try is buy a Serial-to-Bluetooth and Serial-To-USB cable, and by using the appropriate gender changers connect the elm device to the usb and serial to serial so now it would be a usb to bluetooth device.

Any thoughts? Or has anyone got this working ? I need help.

Modifying carman to read a serial port directly makes the most sense, as that's all it's doing anyways, but wrapping that functionality in some bluetooth connection code which we don't need. The bluetooth-serial serial-usb would work, but it's a pretty kludgy approach and completely unnecessary as far as I'm concerned. If I've got some time this afternoon I'll try grabbing a copy of carman SVN and see if I can build a "simplified" connection function to route the current bluetooth commands to any serial port. If you don't see anything posted up about it in the next few days send me a PM to remind me please.

Thanks!

**Bump**

I've been waiting for this ever since I cheaped out and bought a serial obdII interface. Wish I'd known about the bluetooth interfaces you can get on ebay or dealextreme.