Visualisation and logging of vehicle data in real time using Android and OBD2

Abstract

After smartphones appeared a few years back, the market for mobile devices has experienced an outstanding growth, even more noticeable after tablets grew in popularity starting the so called "post-PC era". These gadgets have developed a computing power no one could have thought of some years back. Having this power in such portable devices has allowed new apps to be built with data collection and consumption in mind. However, real time data collection and processing can still present some challenges to both developers and users in fields such as resource consumption or ease of use. Furthermore, having an app that behaves as expected at every moment while maintaining a responsive UI needs of special considerations when designing and implementing it. A good knowledge of how the underlying operative system works and the APIs it presents to developers are especially important. This will help to mitigate some of the problems that are commonly found on apps that deal with real time data processing. We are going to investigate which are the possible ways of dealing with an app for mobile devices, specifically focused on Android, which collects data from a Bluetooth connection in real time from a car and visualises it while logging that data on the background. We are going to extract from this development that are the best practises when designing and implementing the app and compare them with other options that were considered during development. Areas which will be considered of special importance include how the app will be structured, defining a good layered system, how to organise modules into Android app components, how the data will flow in our system or how we are going to deal with the data storage on a database. After this the final app will be presented, including some final remarks on how the system could be further improved