Torque PIDs for Toyota Auris Hybrid

I have a 2017 model Toyota Auris Hybrid, and I like to monitor its status using an OBD-II bluetooth adapter and Torque Pro app on my Android phone. By default, the app only comes with a set of standard variables (PIDs, Parameter IDs), and to get any interesting data out of the car, some custom PIDs are needed.

Luckily, the Auris is quite close to Prius, and some guys at PriusChat forum have gathered a very comprehensive list of PIDs for Prius.

However, probably due to small differences in the cars quite large amount of those PIDs are not working and it is rather difficult to use since I never know beforehand which PID will work and which not. For this reason, I checked all the PIDs whether they work with Auris or not, and removed the non-working ones. I used the Prius list with latest change done 13.7.2014 as a base.

Here is the result csv. It has 212 items which are prefixed with "Auris-" to easily distinquish them from the standard PIDs. I think there might still be 1 or 2 that do not work, and IIRC I added battery power calculation that does not exist as a PID. With this list, it is very simple to do dashboards even without a connection to the car. Below is an example of a dashboard I made for testing.

It shows some basic information like GPS speed, battery state-of-charge and current, and ICE (gasoline engine) rotation speed. The graph shows the battery power limits together with the actual charge/discharge power (it works only with transparent theme, 3 graphs on top of each other).

The meters show coolant, catalysator, and battery temperatures.

On the bottom line there is indicators for ICE warm up request (if it is yes, the ICE will run until warm before the car can switch to EV mode automatically) and cruise control status with its setpoint (which is not normally shown in the dashboard, which is weird).

I've found the above information to be pretty good for normal driving. Other screens can be made for debuggin e.g. the battery condition. I also think about doing counters for energy regenerated and percent/distance driven in EV mode etc. Maybe I'll update the PID file if I get around to implement those.

Happy driving!

Receiving Aalto-1 satellite with RTL-SDR

I recently bought an RTL-SDR dongle mostly to try to receive weather satellitse (see e.g. this guide for guide on how, and this nice software for more info), but also to experiment with receiving other kinds of radio communications.

While browsing the net for information about different satellites, antennas, etc I ended up to a Finnish page about receiving Aalto-1 satellite. The satellite is built by students at a Finnish Aalto university, hence the name. The satellite information is freely available and some parts of the communication is easy to receive.

The easiest part, the only part I got, is a morse code of the satellite callsign, AALTO1. It is transmitted every 3 minutes at 437.220 MHz frequency and it lasts for 6 seconds. The modulation is constant wave.

I used a simple V-dipole antenna which I mainly use for weather satellites at 137...138 MHz. I pointed it to south (since from there the satellite crosses the sky at my location) with as clear as possible view to sky. The antenna is most likely not optimal, but seemed to work somehow.

 

I used gpredict to see when the Aalto-1 satellite would cross the sky, but it is possible to track it online, too. When the time was, I tuned the RTL-SDR dongle to 437.220 MHz, and set it to record the baseband. About when the satellite was directly above, I got the above signal! (The vertical dashed line in the middle). Success! Looks very similar to the picture in the other blog, but not as clear due to lower signal level.

A bit later I also received next beacon with better signal quality, but unfortunately I was not recording at this time. Picture of the second beacon (beginning was already off the screen):

After recording was done, I reloaded the IQ wav file back to RTL-SDR using the FilePlayer plugin and searched for the signal. After finding it, I set CW modulation with 500 Hz bandwidth and centered the tuner to the signal. The signal frequency was a bit off, partly due to the low quality oscillator of the RTL-SDR dongle, partly due to doppler effect as the satellite flies so fast over the sky. I tuned about to the center of the beacon.

I played the demodulated signal to Audacity via a virtual audio cable. The signal indeed sounds like morse code an parsing the first 5 characters, they are .- .- .-.. - ---, which stands for AALTO. The last character in this recording is bad, but from the screenshot of second beacon, it can be barely seen that it is .---- which stands for 1.

Here is a link to the CW demodulated audio signal from the first recording. The doppler shift can clearly be heard in the signal!