Ian Hawkins

Torque is an engine diagnostics application for Android that allows you to directly monitor your car engine control unit (ECU) and retrieve various information from the sensors connected to it as well as use your phones internal GPS and accelerometer sensors to graph other information such as acceleration

Torque can be used to view any stored fault codes on your vehicles ECU, then, after a mechanic fixing the fault, it also can clear the fault codes allowing you to clear the ‘Check Engine’ light warning on your dashboard

Torque can use a multitude of OBD adapters, ranging from the cheap (and slightly buggy) adapters you can find on ebay, to the more reliable PLX Devices Kiwi Bluetooth and OBDKey which are the amongst the best.

The adapters are used to interface your Android device to the vehicle engine control unit (ECU).

Kiwi Bluetooth, pictured above – the most fully supported adapter for Torque

OBDKey, well constructed – "It just works!"

Generic bluetooth adapter from ebay, generally alright but some can suffer from build quality issues affecting reliability, and causing strange things to happen like engines refusing to start. Try to avoid if you can

PLX devices kiwi Wi-Fi OBD, good but you have to hack your phone for root access, the recently announced PLX Kiwi Bluetooth adapter is preferred as no modifications are required.

Torque can be downloaded from the Android market ad free, or you can try the ad-supported version. Torque requires android 2.0/2.1 or above!

The change log and version history for Torque can be viewed by clicking here.

Any car manufacturered from 2000 onwards (and quite a few from the mid ’90s) should have an OBD2 compliant diagnostics port installed. Check your manual or google if you are unsure if yours has one or where it is – some ports are hidden quite well under ashtrays, etc.

Torque can also upload in realtime data to the Torque viewer website so that you can view your recorded OBD data online

Some screenshots from Torque for Android are shown below (Click the image for full size view)

There is now a forum available to discuss Torque!

Here’s something else I’m working on – an MMORPG for Android called “WinterSun”. It’s in closed beta at the moment but hopefully it will be released soon.
The video shows a small part of the game engine, networked to a server (this is very optimised so it can run on very basic GPRS, as well as 3G) and also shows me getting owned by an NPC.

Here is a video of Torque ‘Jesse’ made and posted on YouTube!

Torque now has theme support, meaning you can now customise the screen to some degree to make it how you want it to look.

Perhaps you want to make the screen look like the rest of the dials in your car? or maybe you just don’t like the default look and feel of the screen. Here’s your chance to change it.

Themes are fairly easy to create – basically a theme package is a .zip file containing 3 files (at the moment). A sample of a theme file is downloadable here

You can test your own themes by extracting the contents of your .zip file to the /.torque/themeDir/ folder on your SD card, then restarting Torque

Once you are happy with your theme then please consider sending it to the theme server so others can enjoy it! You can email the archive directly to me (my email address is available via the android market developer links, or just post it to the forums!) and it will be included in the theme server, simple!

Good news!

Torque now supports an easy way to add extended PIDs for any particular model of vehicle to the list of PIDs that you can monitor. This complements the existing custom PID editor so you now have a highly configurable OBD2 tool! If you have access to a list of EOBD PIDs for your vehicle and want to see them added to Torque then drop me a message and I’ll see what I can do!

Here’s a screenshot that shows how easy it now is to configure Torque for your vehicle

Torque is always being improved thanks to useful feedback from the many people that use it,
and couple of requests back when Torque was first released asked if I could put something in to allow you to skin the application.

In most recent release of Torque (currently 1.1.3) you now have the option to change the background to whatever you want – a sample illustration with the help of my cat, Noodles is shown below

There has already been work done creating theme packages for Torque, so you can quickly customise (and share) new looks for dial displays, along with a few new dial types. They aren’t quite finished yet, but will be going into the main release sometime soon.

LOL Sites for android combines several of the internets funniest sites (LOLCats/Icanhazcheezburger, Ihazahotdog, FAILBlog, ThereIFixedIt, etc) into a simple and easy to use lol viewer.

Separating it from other viewers is the ability to pre-cache the latest lols on your phone so you have no waiting time and the ability to configure many behavioural options for the program (Rotate, scaling, etc)

LOL Sites can be downloaded from the android market

Speed HUD uses your GPS and phone screen to display your speed, direction and acceleration.
You can reverse the text so you can put your phone on your dashboard at night and see your speed on your windshield like a Head up Display (HUD)

Some features included are:

• Logging / KML export to Google Earth
• Speech support
• Safety Camera database support (beta)