I've been playing with processing my data logs and ended up writing a scanner program. It doesn't do anything fancy yet, but it does talk to the ECU and shows pretty pictures. The reason I started doing this was because my laptop has a huge screen and none of the free programs looked good (most of them didn't even work) when the laptop is in the passenger seat. Mine does! It's written for newer laptops, so people with Windows XP and Vista should have it running without any problems. The program is available at http://www.datalogs.net/files/ALDL_Scanner.exe and is free, with source code coming soon. Let me know what you guys think and how I can improve it. NOTE: Right now, it can ONLY DO 8192 baud, so 90-92 cars. I don't have a 160 baud ECU, so I don't support them yet. If people care, I can add it later. Also, it only works with ALDL cables that either plug into a COM port or are USB but get assigned a COM port number in Windows. Basically it needs a COM port number to run. USAGE: Download program, take laptop to car, plug in your ALDL cable into laptop. Start ALDL_Scanner.exe. It will take up your whole screen and you will see a lot of red zeros and three big black squares. Turn ignition on and click "Start Talking." It should show a single 0 in the RPM area and "Frame Rate" text should be green and show numbers between 8 and 12. That means everything is working, the numbers represent how many times the laptop talked to your ECU in the last second. Then you can start the car and get to data logging. The end. SCREEN SHOT DESCRIPTION: Program is divided into 4 main areas, with upper and lower VE tables on the bottom, knock table in the right-top corner and various stats in the left-top corner. The stats are annotated here: http://www.datalogs.net/files/ALDL_Scanner_Explain.jpg The number under voltage is "knock retard degrees", and voltage has a "V" after the value

Just in case anyone is wondering why I would waste the time to replicate the functionality that dozens of programs already do quite well... The goal here is to eventually provide functionality that is not offered by other scanners. For example, I got it to the point where data logs can be compared between runs. Now I am writing some code for the datalogs.net website that will let me upload some track runs and compare them. Of course normal people can pull up Excel and just do it that way, but if it's online, you can compare your car with other people's cars. Or show your datalogs to someone that knows a thing or two about tuning and have them offer suggestions. That's just one example. Or I am playing around with some XNA code (think Xbox 360) that lets you draw a translucent 3D VE table in realtime, as reported by the ECU. Sure it's pointless since you can look at this data in Excel or TunerPro, but it's pretty damn slick. And did I mention realtime? As in, watch your ECU try to correct the AFR as you spray nitrous as it's pouring in Or yet another example, as soon as my LC-1 wideband gets here, I'm going to add the output from it into the datalog. So you can keep track of wha the ECU is saying and what the wideband is saying at the same time. Yes, normal people would run S_AUJP and wire up the wideband to one of the free pins, but some of us are lazy or suck at soldering. Certainly not me, but I'm just providing examples here

Anyways, I'm a graduate student in Computer Science, so I get a kick out of messing around with all this stuff. Now that the datalogger is pretty stable (I just fixed the one bug that was driving me nuts), I can start to look at ways to process the resulting data logs in ways that haven't been done before. If anyone wants to help me test the code or has any ideas on what to do with data logs, that would make things go faster.

Naturally, everything is free and open source, in the hopes that it may one day help someone else.

Looks good. I will try itthis week end.