I thought of a neat little feature that is probably totally useless to 95% of us, but since I figure that it is probably possible to do (because its there, thats why) then why not throw it on the table..

A little while ago I took my car to the shop. They hooked up some device to my cars onboard 'computer' to diagnose the problem. I have no idea what the device displayed but I thought.. why not interface my cars diagnostic computer to display results on my empeg .. maybe via the serial port. Maybe I could monitor engine temperature or something remotely usefull, or RPMs.. I dont know.

It just seems silly for my car to have multiple computers and not have them networked.. if nothing else, I could eliminate the money Joe Mechanic charged me for using his machine.

Anyone care to take this idea a little further?

The system the mechanic used was called OBD-II or "On Board Diagnostics Revision 2".

There have been many discussions on this BBS on this topic. Do an "or" search on the terms "OBDII", "OBD-II", "OBD2", or "OBD-2".