Potted!

So here it is, fully enclosed in some resin ready for permanent mounting on the car. It may not be all that obvious from the first picture as the resin I've used is clear since the black stuff I originally ordered never arrived. So I had to use some standard epoxy resin which is normally used for fibreglass work but I already had at home.

And here it is mounted on the car. You'll note the USB cable is not connected here - this is normal operation. The USB cable is only required for laptop monitoring and configuration.

I have made a few alterations to the software over the past day or so as well. Nothing particularly important but a few usability tweaks on the front-end configuration settings. I plan to get the car MOT'd on Saturday with this particular module mounted. It'll then stay on the car for a bit more testing before I build the other one for the other side. I plan to add a Bluetooth capability to the next version so that you can listen to its diagnostic information via mobile phone. That will come a bit later though.

And as an extra bonus, here's a short mobile phone demo of the unit in action, fitted and installed in its rightful place on the car. Sorry about the sound quality - it sounds like tractor on the phone but trust me it really is a 355!

Demo Video

To explain what is happening in the video, you can see I've configured this one as a RIGHT sensor (it's actually installed on the left hand side of the car for the eagle eyed viewers). At one point I change the setting to LEFT and store it. I also change the thermocouple sensitivity to 1 second. You can't see the data I'm entering because I haven't turned on local echo on the terminal. 

The terminal itself is just a bog standard terminal emulator set to 9600,8,N,1

While I'm not in the menu, you can see the temperature of the Cat steadily increasing. The car has been running for around 2 minutes at this time from cold (about 19 degrees celsius) so the Cats are still coming up to temperature. It settles down around 480 Celsius at idle but obviously goes much hotter with some revs.

So that's it - phase one complete and some on vehicle testing is now required.

I have a  few changes to consider for the second one;

• No holes in the side of the case, as the epoxy bled out quite a lot before it went off, even though I plugged the gaps around the cables beforehand

• Possiby expose the USB connection with a cable rather than a socket

• Bluetooth connection (maybe) - module alread ordered!  Might not fit this in the same package size though, and I really want to stick to the standard dimensions.