I downloaded the free version of the Torque app and started playing with it. Here are my initial impressions.
First off this requires some hardware not included. You have to buy a blue-tooth dongle that goes into the ODBII port. There are tons of them listed on eBay. I was hoping to have this in time for my 1000 mile round trip to Philly over Xmas so I went with a NJ listing but the seller was promptly deleted from eBay and I had to file a grievance to get my $ back from eBay. Since it wasn't going to be here in time anyway I went with a listing in China for much less $ and it arrived in only 6 days. :confused013: Watch out for the listings...the pricing varies hugely as does shipping. I ended up getting mine for $19.99 including shipping. Search for "blue tooth OBD". Mine also came with a disk with an app for my laptop which may even have code clearing and programming capabilities but I haven't played with it.
Torque:
- I still have the free version but having proved its value I will now pay the couple bucks for the full version. I have a Droid Incredible but it is also available for many other phones.
- The dongle takes seconds to plug in. It must then be blue tooth linked to the phone and then the Torque app has a setting page to select from the previously linked blue tooth devices. The selection page also showed my home TV (I was in the driveway) and my GPS (in another car) but I don't know what it would do if I selected one of those. Total configuration time was about 3 minutes and doesn't need to be repeated if you plug the dongle into another vehicle.
- There are lots of possible data items that you can choose to monitor. (3 different O2 sensor voltages if you're into that kind of thing). It also gets data from the phone that it can display. So you can end up with lots and lots of guages and dials. The presentation is 5 "pages" upon which you can drop as many guages, dials, or graphs as you want. There are also "widgets". You have some flexibility in the sizes of these presentations and you can move them around. I found that I could fit 6 small dials on a page and it was quite readable, or you could put one large one and it fills up most of a page. You skip to different pages on the droid by swiping your finger...other phones may work slightly differently. You can play with configuration with no commitment or cost by downloading the free app and messing with it. My daughter amused herself monitoring the phone provided functions (GPS, speed, altitude, etc) while we drove to Philly before we had the dongle.
[
I wanted to put a picture the display here but I can't take a picture of my phone with my phone! ]
- If you're into that kinda stuff you can also change "skins" to one of several provided ones. I'm happy with the default which is the one in their ad sometimes seen here on the forum and looks kinda like carbon fibre. I think you can also make your own skins if you want. I played with this only briefly but I think you lose your dial selections if you do this. I am not willing to try again because I'm getting my favorite dials placed.
- The responsiveness is surprisingly good. I expected a delay but if so it was not noticeable. The needle on my tach and the "needle" on the phone seemed perfectly in synch.
- I have not experimented with it but apparently you can log data and upload it. I'm planning on using it just as guages for now so probably won't play with that.
- I did visit the support forum and register. It isn't as busy as this forum but the author appear to have a great reputation and personally responds to almost all of the threads. He seems to be liked and appreciated by all and I noticed no serious complaints. The users seem happy. He has produced special versions for folks with issues although he does point out that with all the different phones out there and all the different sofware levels on them he can't promise to solve every issue of every one. I didn't notice any issues.
- Deleting and moving the dials/graphs/widgets is easy once you figure out how. I am a new droid user or it would have been obvious...you touch the dial and wait until it provides options (Delete, Move, etc).
In summary I am greatly impressed. I figure for $25 between the dongle and the app it provides lots of configurable guages and is portable to other vehicles in seconds. Pretty impressive!
If you might be interested I'd recommend downloading the free version of the app and playing with the configuration and looking at available data to decide if you like it. Then you can choose to order the dongle and incur the huge expense
:rof only if it has what you want.
First off this requires some hardware not included. You have to buy a blue-tooth dongle that goes into the ODBII port. There are tons of them listed on eBay. I was hoping to have this in time for my 1000 mile round trip to Philly over Xmas so I went with a NJ listing but the seller was promptly deleted from eBay and I had to file a grievance to get my $ back from eBay. Since it wasn't going to be here in time anyway I went with a listing in China for much less $ and it arrived in only 6 days. :confused013: Watch out for the listings...the pricing varies hugely as does shipping. I ended up getting mine for $19.99 including shipping. Search for "blue tooth OBD". Mine also came with a disk with an app for my laptop which may even have code clearing and programming capabilities but I haven't played with it.
Torque:
- I still have the free version but having proved its value I will now pay the couple bucks for the full version. I have a Droid Incredible but it is also available for many other phones.
- The dongle takes seconds to plug in. It must then be blue tooth linked to the phone and then the Torque app has a setting page to select from the previously linked blue tooth devices. The selection page also showed my home TV (I was in the driveway) and my GPS (in another car) but I don't know what it would do if I selected one of those. Total configuration time was about 3 minutes and doesn't need to be repeated if you plug the dongle into another vehicle.
- There are lots of possible data items that you can choose to monitor. (3 different O2 sensor voltages if you're into that kind of thing). It also gets data from the phone that it can display. So you can end up with lots and lots of guages and dials. The presentation is 5 "pages" upon which you can drop as many guages, dials, or graphs as you want. There are also "widgets". You have some flexibility in the sizes of these presentations and you can move them around. I found that I could fit 6 small dials on a page and it was quite readable, or you could put one large one and it fills up most of a page. You skip to different pages on the droid by swiping your finger...other phones may work slightly differently. You can play with configuration with no commitment or cost by downloading the free app and messing with it. My daughter amused herself monitoring the phone provided functions (GPS, speed, altitude, etc) while we drove to Philly before we had the dongle.
[
I wanted to put a picture the display here but I can't take a picture of my phone with my phone! ]- If you're into that kinda stuff you can also change "skins" to one of several provided ones. I'm happy with the default which is the one in their ad sometimes seen here on the forum and looks kinda like carbon fibre. I think you can also make your own skins if you want. I played with this only briefly but I think you lose your dial selections if you do this. I am not willing to try again because I'm getting my favorite dials placed.
- The responsiveness is surprisingly good. I expected a delay but if so it was not noticeable. The needle on my tach and the "needle" on the phone seemed perfectly in synch.
- I have not experimented with it but apparently you can log data and upload it. I'm planning on using it just as guages for now so probably won't play with that.
- I did visit the support forum and register. It isn't as busy as this forum but the author appear to have a great reputation and personally responds to almost all of the threads. He seems to be liked and appreciated by all and I noticed no serious complaints. The users seem happy. He has produced special versions for folks with issues although he does point out that with all the different phones out there and all the different sofware levels on them he can't promise to solve every issue of every one. I didn't notice any issues.
- Deleting and moving the dials/graphs/widgets is easy once you figure out how. I am a new droid user or it would have been obvious...you touch the dial and wait until it provides options (Delete, Move, etc).
In summary I am greatly impressed. I figure for $25 between the dongle and the app it provides lots of configurable guages and is portable to other vehicles in seconds. Pretty impressive!
If you might be interested I'd recommend downloading the free version of the app and playing with the configuration and looking at available data to decide if you like it. Then you can choose to order the dongle and incur the huge expense
:rof only if it has what you want.
