[Links]

The OBD-II UART Adapter for Arduino works as a data bridge between vehicle's OBD-II port and the serial UART of Arduino, used for reading out data such as speed or engine RPM from car's ECU computer. With dedicated Arduino library, it is extremely simple to perform a readout on Arduino. The adapter embeds a MPU-6050 accelerometer/gyro/temperature sensor module inside with I2C interface. The accelerometer can be used for measuring a car's acceleration and steering G-force. The gyroscope can be used for measuing car's orientation without GPS.



Besides providing OBD-II data access, it also outpus DC 5V power supply (converted and regulated from OBD-II port) for Arduino and the attached devices.

The adapter has a standard OBD-II connector which can be plugged and locked in the OBD-II port usually under the dashboard of your car. A cable comes out from the adapter and splits into 3 connectors at the end, which are power connector (VCC/GND), OBD-II data connector (Rx/Tx) and I2C sensor connector (SDA/SCL). They can be connected to Arduino with onboard breakout pins or breakout shield. Your Arduino device will look tidy in car with only one connected cable.



Links

• Product page for OBD-II UART Adapter
• Source code repository of the arduino library and example sketches
• MPU-6050 programming guide
• Product support forum

This OLED module is supported by my MultiLCD library. If you just want to display texts with it, my library will be very handy to use.
https://github.com/stanleyhuangyc/MultiLCD

Recently I developed a library for ease the job of displaying texts and numbers on different LCD/OLED modules. This is mainly for my OBD-II data logger project which can be made up of different sets of Arduino hardware. I named the library as Arduino Text Display Library for Multiple LCD, or short as MultiLCD.

The source code is available on Github.

The library encapsulates several libraries for various Arduino LCD/LED display shields or modules into a set of unified APIs.

Currently it supports these hardware:

    DFRobot LCD4884 shield
    Nokia 3310/5100 LCD module
    LCD1602 shield
    SSD1306 OLED module
    ZT I2C OLED module

The library includes fonts data for ASCII characters (5×7) and digits (8×8, 16×16). By using the library, it is extremely simple for display texts and numbers on desired position on a LCD screen, while very little change is needed to switch from one LCD module to another.

The library class inherits the Print class of Arduino, so that you can display texts on LCD with standard Arduino functions like this:

Code:

lcd.print("Hello, World!";)
lcd.print(foo, DEC);
lcd.print(bar, HEX);
lcd.print(1.23)         // gives "1.23"
lcd.print(1.23456, 2);  // gives "1.23"

Besides, it provides unified APIs for initializing and controlling the LCD, as well as some convenient operations.

Code:

void begin(); /* initializing */
void clear(); /* clear screen */
void setCursor(unsigned char column, unsigned char line); /* set current cursor */
void printInt(unsigned int n, FONT_SIZE size); /* display a integer number with desired size of font*/
void printLong(unsigned long n, FONT_SIZE size); /* display a long number with desired size of font*/

The code using the library can be extremely simple.

Code:

#include <Wire.h>
#include <MultiLCD.h>

LCD_SSD1306 lcd; /* for SSD1306 OLED module */

void setup()
{
    lcd.begin();
    lcd.clear();

    lcd.setCursor(0, 0);
    lcd.print("Hello, world!");

    lcd.setCursor(0, 1);
    lcd.printLong(1234567890, FONT_SIZE_SMALL);

    lcd.setCursor(0, 2);
    lcd.printLong(1234567890, FONT_SIZE_MEDIUM);

    lcd.setCursor(0, 3);
    lcd.printLong(12345678, FONT_SIZE_LARGE);
}

I didn't experience noticable slowing down on my end. I have been modifying and improving the building and uploading stage for Arduino but didn't change anything to the IDE's code editing and completion part.

An I2C 1602 LCD might be better (working with any system with I2C) and costs less than $15.

I just started to play with TFT LCD screen with Arduino. I used Itead 2.8″ TFT shield which is said to work great with UTFT library. Taking into account that Arduino has too limited Flash to hold a full frame of picture, and that the shield has a SD card socket on the back, I decided to make a SD card picture viewer as my first approach.

My sketch is here.





The 8-bit AVR-based Arduino has not only limited storage but also limited computation power. It is impossible to decode JPEG or PNG on-the-fly with Arduino, nor is it possible to load a whole bitmap from SD card into SRAM. The image files have to be stored in raw data format and loaded and rendered portion by portion. The native data format of the TFT control chip is RGB565 (2 bytes for a pixel, 5 bits for red, 6 bits for green, 5 bis for blue). So I used MediaCoder, which is a free universal media transcoder I developed, to generate the raw image data of RGB565.

Continue to read on my blog

Is your TFT shield same size as MEGA? How do you breakout the unused pins from MEGA beneath the shield?

A tragedy after switching to Leonardo is that the SD card on the shield can no longer work as the SPI lines changes and the shield does not use ICSP pins.

Click "Project" menu and choose "Add Files".

Here is the easiest way to give Arduino data access as well as power supply from OBD-II port.
http://www.arduinodev.com/hardware/obd-kit/

I was experiencing the same Serial issue with Itead TFT shield (2.8") on Arduino UNO. I was also going to display bitmap sent from PC via USB  but it was totally stucked.
I was thinking whether leonardo would work as its D0 and D1 is seaparte from USB serial unlike UNO. And it worked! I use following to declare:

Code:

UTFT myGLCD(ITDB28,A5,A4,A3,A2); // Arduino Leonardo

What's your target? For Arduino MEGA 1280/2560, sketch is compiled with -O2 (optimize for speed) whereas Arduino IDE compiles with -Os (optimize for size). Faster code is normally larger.

The HEX files are also larger,  With the Arduino IDE the HEX file is 18,934 bytes whereas with CodeBlocks it's 21,573 bytes.

Looks like there's some more optimization to be done.

$6 for a 8x8 RGB matrix is incredibly cheap. Can you share me the link for that?
Actually my module is an Arduino (atmega168) itself.

I've built up a I2C driven 8x8 RGB matrix. Maybe you'd like to take a look.
http://www.arduinodev.com/rgb-led-matrix-kit/

I recommend this I2C OLED module which I used in my car to display some engine data.