Yoshi’s Drift Box: Day 2

It’s only been a year and two months since my last update. I did get a lot of interest in this project so I figure I’d update.

Before I put this away last time, I managed to get all major features working except accepting external IO. There still is some left over pins and ports so creating an analog to digital conversion that links into the arduino’s bus shouldn’t be too hard. But I do expect it to be the most involved part of this.

I forget what the special secret was from the last post so here’s the outline of what I want to get done:

  1. Log all data to external SD card
  2. Load background image from SD card for “theming”
  3. Display useful data on screen
  4. Math for drift data/scoring
  5. Accept external I/O sensors like steering angle
  6. External software/website for parsing log files
  7. Touch screen has toggle buttons for various cool things

Interestingly, most of the concepts have already been proven. I wound up hacking up a lot of the canned touch screen and SD card code but I got the background images to load using this UTFT RGB565 converter. The “raw” file format used by the UTFT lcd screen is proprietary so this converter is a necessary evil. It’s a bit of an annoying step but it works.


The green text on the middle left of the image is the current coordinates of the press. It isn’t a button per se but it will allow me to accept touch input then do something as a result.

Finally, here is an excel print out of 3 minutes of log time for the accelerometer chip. It’s integrated into the OBD2 port under the dash so that could prove problematic. For some reason, there seems to be some offsets. Z axis appears to be forward/backward movement and Y axis seems to be side to side movement.

Unfortunately, my daily driver subaru won’t connect to the I2C OBD2 adapter and read PIDs but it will do everything else. So in the mean time, I hope to get the logging format hammered out and some more polish work on the code as a whole.

For my next update, I’ll likely focus on the GPS unit and see how I can export that to google maps.

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