 So my next few videos are going to be on car stuff. So we're going to review some stuff I went over a couple of years ago, go into more detail on stuff in future videos. But today we're going to be looking at this, an OBD2 reader. So OBD2, what is that? So OBD stands for onboard diagnostics, 2 would be version 2. All cars in the United States, well this standard has been around since the 80s, all cars in the United States since 1996 have been required to have a port for this in them. I believe Europe, followed a few years later, early 2000s, so good chance you have a port like this in your car. I don't know about the rest of the world. So let's look at this. This is a bulky USB one. I got this years ago, if you look back at my videos, like I said I've gone over this before. They have smaller, lighter weight ones that are wireless now through Bluetooth or even Wi-Fi, which we will go over in a few more videos. But today we're going to look at something very simple, just hooking this up and getting a gooey interface for it. So first thing we need to know, once we hook this up to our computer, it registers a serial port, in this particular case, a USB serial port. Whenever you're communicating through serial, you need to know the blod rate, blod rate. I always feel weird saying that word. It's printed right here on the device. So you can see it's printed right here. This particular device is 38,400 blod. Now again, this is a USB one hooked to your computer. You can also get ones that are standalone units that you can check diagnostic stuff and reset and check error codes. We can do all that with this, but it has to be hooked to a computer. Just depends on what you want to do. It's a lot cooler to hook it to a computer, right? So where do you plug it in at? First off, this is what the port looks like on the device. It is standard. They should all look like that. And on your car, most cars, it's going to be right under the steering wheel here to the left of the pedals. I have seen cars where it's covered up by a plastic piece you have to pop off. Most times it's just exposed. So mine's right under here. It's very easy to plug in. You just need to feel which side dips in and you go like so. Ta-da. And of course the other end plugs right into your USB port on your computer. Now once you've plugged it into a Linux device, it should show up as a USB serial device, which is under your device folder. So forward slash dev, and then it should be forward slash ttyusb, in most cases zero, unless you have another USB serial device hooked up to your computer. Which you probably don't. And if you do, you probably know you do. So that's going to be the port we're going to use. Again, we're going to use the baud rate of 38,400. And today we're going to be looking at using a program called scan tools. Scan tools should be in your repositories. So just search your repositories on a Linux system for scan tools. It's a free open source GUI interface scan tool. So use apt get or apt or whatever package manager you use on your system. I'm going to try to position this so there's not too much glare, but I'm outside. So again, once you have it installed, you can either search through your applications menu or you can just type in scan tool at your shell. When you hit enter, it should open up this GUI interface. By the way, when I say GUI interface, that means a graphical user interface. So I'm kind of using the word interface twice and that shouldn't be a GUI as a graphical user interface. So it's not a shell application, but we will be going over those in future tutorials. So when you open up scan tools, you're going to get this configuration menu. It's going to ask whether you want metric or US. So I'm going to choose US and some in the US. Next you need to choose your device. So for me, where's my mouse cursor? There it is. I'm going to scroll down to where it says dev TTY USB zero. And I'm going to pick my blood rate of 38,400 may be different for your device. Again, look at your device. I'm going to leave it as a windowed rather than full screen. I'm going to click save. It's going to tell me that changing the blood rate could cause the program to crash. I'm going to say continue anyway. Give it a moment and it will scan through that. It's going to connect to device. Now my car is not on. There is power going to the device, but I'm not going to be able to pull any information that I want from the car until the car is running. So I'm going to go ahead and start the car up. So our first option in the menu here now that the car is on is read codes. Read codes would be if you have any type of error message up on your dash. You can search that. It will give you out the information on that. You may have to do a little Googling if it's not in the system here, but usually you'll get an ID of some sort that you can look up for what the problem is. You can also reset codes. What we really want to look at today is the second option here, which is sensor data or data depending on how you say it. So once this is on, you can see we're in a menu here. I hope you can see that clearly with a list of stuff currently on this screen. Only one thing is on, which is the RPMs. Okay. It took me a minute of rearranging stuff to try to get a good angle of this. So right now you can see a list of things and you can see most of them are off by default RPMs are on. You can see it's just below 800 RPMs here. I am going to try to reach past here with my hand and push on the gas on the throttle and you can see that number increases. Now most of the options are off. Now this is communicating with the CAN bus on the car, which has a limited speed that it can transmit stuff. So more stuff you have on, slower your responses of the data output here. So if you're only looking at certain things, you only want to have certain things on, but you can see RPMs here. If I turn this one on here, this one is how far, come on, turn on. There we go. The position of the throttle, which seems to be around 13% when nothing's happening, but as I press the throttle down, you can see that number go up and then come down as I release. You can also turn on miles per hour, since I picked US, it might also be able to get kilometers per hour. Not might also, you can. But you're not going to see any change in that number unless I actually put the car in gear and drive. Now this is just one of eight pages that you can flip through of different information you can get. Temperature of sensors, ambient temperature, oil pressures, all that stuff from this menu. Let's end up with this video. I just wanted to quickly show you that you can quickly get information with a USB cable and a simple piece of software. Of course, in the next couple of videos, we're going to look at connecting through the shell, then maybe using some Python. And we're also going to look at a Bluetooth device. Again, this one, I got a while ago. I think it probably cost me $15 or $20. And it's wired. It's very simple. You hook up. You're ready to go. You may have an issue. If you try to run Scan Tools and it says it can't access, you don't have permission, you have to be part of the dial-up group, dial-out group on Linux to access a serial device. So your options are, add yourself to the dial-out group. I did a video on that, a couple videos back. So go ahead and search for that, or just Google Search, adding user to groups. Remember, you have to log out and log back in any time you add a user to a group. So you do that. You can always start Scan Tool as sudo, but that's not the proper way of doing it, but in a pinch you could. Again, this is simple. But obviously, if you're just going to be something you have hooked up all the time because you want to monitor stuff all the time, this is not a good idea. We'll look at using a very small Bluetooth device that plugs in. Prices have come down. The Bluetooth one was only $10 when I bought it last week, or $11. It's almost as simple. Basically, it's the same exact process, except for you have to connect to the Bluetooth device and issue one command to get it activating after that. But wires always have less issues. With a Bluetooth device, if you're having issues, it could be a multiple thing. So all depends on your case scenario. If you're just going to use this to check and reset error codes every once in a while, USB might be the simplest option. Bluetooth is also nice. You can also connect your phone to it, which we'll look at a little bit as well. Anyway, I thank you for watching. I hope you look forward to more videos like this. Films by chris.com. That's Chris Decay. There's a link in the description. As always, I hope that you have a great day.