Is the power on/off on the front or the side of the unit? Will it not automatically turn off when the car shuts off?
Power button is on the front, lower left corner. If you look at a pic it has the dark colored bars/end pieces on the unit. The button is in that. Nice button. Small rod that sticks out 1/8th of an inch and feels and operates solidly. No. It does not turn off or do anything when you shut the car off. I think they're working on that. The problem is that OBD II diagnostic ports are always powered. You can detect that the car has been shut off easier than you can detect that it has been started. Problem there is that you have to constantly poll something. Poll too often and you're drawing too much power waking up the device, polling, and going back to sleep. Since you have to wake up you can't power down completely. Poll too slowly and it could take a long time to go active after the car has been started. Then you have to choose wisely for what you're polling. For example OnStar diagnostics will generate traffic on the bus. If you're looking for that you can go active when you shouldn't. The device draws a significant amount of power (naturally the TFT screen takes a good bit (and the huge ARM processor that runs it). The other processor doesn't draw so much but they put the power management on the fast processor. Oh well. With the screen set fairly bright it draws about 200mAh. Press the button once and it toggles the screen off and on. With the device running and the screen off it draws about 100mAh (I think). That's still a lot. Press and hold and it shuts down and powers off. No idea why they left that out in the initial implementation.
Well, I haven't done all that much with it in the last week. I haven't found any major flaws that I didn't know about last week. Well, 1. I was logging 9 parameters and the sample rate was very slow. Almost 0.7 seconds with the Chrysler specific pids. They made a fix for that and now it's up to almost 80 times per second. I think that's going to make it into the next firmware release. They have these themes. You pick a theme in setup and menu out to the gauges. Within a theme they have a number of screens with different gauge layouts. Different number of gauges, different style of gauges and combinations. You use the arrow buttons (on the touch screen) to move back and forth between the screens. They're all pretty cool but I use the default theme. I might like the "sport" theme better but it's blue with red lettering and I can't see the difference so well (no, I'm not blue red color blind but since I'm a presbyopic it's not so easy in the car)... The default theme is great for me. What I'd like to see is totally custom gauge layouts/screens. I believe they have a skin editor just about ready. No auto off is a pain but I've pretty much gotten used to that now. I almost never leave the car and come back with the screen still on... LogWorks 3 is not a pretty or flexible as the DashHawk logging client but it's fully functional. It's just that it looks like graphs you get from a dyno. I just took a couple of logs. I'll post one here in a little while.
For everyone going to SEMA they're going to be there with their latest and greatest release, features, and firmware. I'd like to get some other people's opinions in here. I'd hate to think anyone would make a large purchase based on my recommendation alone and then be disappointed. Good time to make this perfectly clear (I should have said something earlier). I AM on their beta tester program and fooling with their pre-release stuff. I'm under no obligation to them other than they hope I will comment, make suggestions, and try out fixes for bugs or enhancements that I find. I guess I was vocal enough on the DashHawk forum that I got drafted. I think I'm pretty unbiased and, for what it's worth, my reputation here (or lack thereof) means a lot more to me than making them happy. I believe BJB and somebody else here (I forgot) has or have had a DashDAQ for a while now. Not sure if they had the Chrysler specific parameters then. Maybe they'll comment.
Here's a LogWorks graph of a log file I took. I'm not real familiar with Logworks but I think this is about as pretty as it gets. You can show/hide traces, when you mouse over a trace or the units for it in the right hand pane it will bold the trace and show a little popup with the name. Like there's 2 "engine degrees" over on the right. One is spark advance and the other is ST KnR. If you mouse over the trace or the "engine degrees" you get a popup that says "SPKADV" for one and "STKR" for the other (and the corresponding trace gets bolded). When they log to logworks format (you can choose CSV for excel, or their internal format which I guess is best for playback on the device -- have to try that yet) it inherits the color you used for the gauge display values and the signal name assigned to the gauge. Naturally I have all the same colors for displayed values on the device so they were all the same color traces. I changed the trace colors and dropped that marker with flag on the graph. So not too pretty but fully functional. I think it looks better on lower res displays. Everybody else's logworks display has the Y axis labels upright next to the axis rather than horizontal underneath (and overlapping) like mine. Dunno about that. They do have an adjustable smoothing function that you can apply to and remove from a trace. Not extremely useful but it can make it look better.
If they want to send me one I will be glad to analyze. Right now it is on my Christmas list. I doubt if I will get sooner......never know. I know another member has one, maybe he is on LX Forums. I THINK he has a 300C. Would be nice to hear from him. If he is 1/2 as detailed as you he should have some good opinions. I would be interested in what he has to say. Being a computer nerd (sort of) I feel it is the way to go. Having an open-source Linux OS means tons of potential. I notice there a few USB ports that are not even used yet....correct. Audio out means it has the potential to talk to you...ie....alarm notification. Hopefully they keep it open and have a desire to improve it every day. Then maybe they won't close up progress like DashHawk did.
I'll have to check out the LXF thread (link?). For me it's the same. It's getting better and better. They have the skin editor out and some of the people with skillz are producing some really nice gauge layouts. A couple of the Chrysler specific pids still don't work but there're generic equivalents so everything I'm interested in is covered. They're adding GPS (external GPS receiver plugs into one of the usb ports and they have software on the unit). I think that will be almost identical to our nav units. Not much of a leap to GPS road track logging. It's going to play tunes and vids? I haven't figured that one out yet but there's an Entertainment icon in the main menu. New GUI is icon based navigation. For the functionality I'm interested in it's working flawlessly. It's great to be able to change screens with the arrow buttons for a whole different set of gauges and you only have to hit the start log button to log whatever gauges are on the screen you're looking at. I expect them to be revealing everything at SEMA. They redid their website and didn't finish it... doh. I guess too busy completing new functionality for SEMA. You can check out the user forum at www.dashdaq.com/forum
That is great news. I am glad this gauge is working for you. It has a bright future due to its core technology.
