Carloop is a completely programmable and fully open sourced OBD-II adapter. You plug in Carloop to the OBD-II connector of a car and you suddenly have access to way more signals and way more CAN messages than any other OBD-II dongle available. What's exciting about Carloop is that since it's completely open source, we have sample code, we have sample firmware and we have hardware schematics on our Github page. The Carloop Basic is our entry-level development kit. It consists of the Carloop adapter by itself plus the Particle Photon. The Particle Photon is an IoT development kit that comes with a free cloud service so you can flash it over the air or send data from your car to the Particle cloud.
They have very, very good documentation and a great community on how to get started The next kit that we're going to talk about is the Carloop Bluetooth and it has the same Carloop as before but it includes a Bluetooth board by RedBear and this bluetooth board actually has the same STM32 microcontroller. It's a very similar form factor to the Particle Photon but it has a BLE and a Wi-Fi radio. And last but not least is the Carloop 3G which is a really cool kit because it has the Particle Electron in addition to the Carloop main board. The Particle Electron has a 3G modem and you can use your own sim card or you could use Particle's sim card. Particle provides a service for $2.99 a month and this kit also comes with a micro USB to USB type B cable and a battery.
The way we test things here at Carloop is by building this test bench that comprises an instrument cluster, a body control module and an engine control module from a 2012 Chevy Cruze. If you own a 2012 Chevy Cruze, you probably recognize the instrument cluster. The reason why I have this displayed here is to show that Carloop doesn't really need any additional battery. This is the Carloop Basic, still in listening mode, you see there is no cables here. It's getting all the power from the OBD-II port.
In this setup, we have the Carloop Dashboard connected to a Linux laptop. Carloop is connected through an extension…that's the Carloop and the micro USB to USB cable connected to this laptop. The laptop is running Linux and it has can-utils installed. What I'm going to do is: I'm going to type a command to send a CAN message to modify the fuel gauge on the Chevy Cruze. If you look at the fuel gauge, it shows that it's empty. If I type this command, when i hit enter you're gonna hear it and that should go to full. Basically, what I'm doing there, is I'm sending a message every 10 milliseconds to command the fuel gauge to go to full.
One of the things that really impressed us when we started Carloop was the enthusiasm by which our community took this project on. We want to invite you to check it out and we're really excited to see what you're gonna build next.
