Monitor Your Car's Inner Performance Auto-Mechanic Rip-off

Monitor Your Car's Inner Performance Auto-Mechanic Rip-off

With the help of Car Sweetheart, A.K.A. “Small but Mighty”, known as Car Diagnostic Tool, the Torque OBD-II App on your Phone is enabled to give you the mechanical and electrical details of the inner workings of your car's brain and engine.

Your car's dashboard is probably home to a speedometer, a tachometer, a fuel gauge, and -- if you're lucky -- a coolant temperature gauge. However, your car's electronic brain (ECU) is actively monitoring dozens of parameters behind the scenes that you, the driver, could find useful. This is where Car Diagnostics Tool and apps like Torque App for Android steps in, putting all of that data at your fingertips and transforming you into a profession auto-specialist of a sort.

Torque doesn't require anything more than the hardware already present on your Android phone to function. Without any external hardware, Torque can still pull sensor data from your phone's GPS antenna, internal compass, barometer, and accelerometer. That data alone gives Torque enough information to calculate 0-60 and quarter-mile times and to record and export historical position logs to Google Earth.

With our Car Diagnostic Tool, it's very easily possible to take full advantage of the app's full functionality and to really dive deeply into the inner workings of your car's electronic brain -- with a connection to your car's OBD-II port through our ODB-II Adapter.  All you need do is to make use of our Car Diagnostic Tool A.K.A. small but mighty which plugs into the vehicle's diagnostics port (OBD-II) and paired with my Android phone wirelessly, to transmit the full spectrum of available vehicle data to the app.

It allows you to log your trips for the purpose of increasing fuel efficiency (it warns you if you accelerate too fast, which is annoying, and will score your driving behavior), but it has other benefits too. For example, it'll integrate with IF (formerly known as IFTTT), which means you can dump all of your trip data into a Google Sheet. I used this to compare different routes to work to see which one was actually fastest (by conditions, as well--it'll log weather during the drive).
Set up a Tasker profile to start Dash when you connect to your bluetooth OBDII adapter and you never even have to touch it. It's worth it when you know what route is probabilistically going to be the fastest on a given day. :)

One user wrote about the top-notch security of our product: “And I highly recommend this bluetooth adapter. I had a BAFX one crap out on me, and I like the extra level of bluetooth security (it has a pair mode so that some stranger can't just connect to your car when you're not around).”

Real-time information
Firing up Torque App brings the user to a home screen where the app's all main functions (Realtime Information, Check Fault Codes, View Map, Test Results, Graphing, etc.) can be selected and accessed. Additionally, the home screen displays one large default gauge -- either a tachometer or accelerometer depending on the hardware present. The free Torque App takes the user straight to the innermost workings of the car engine. The Realtime Information dashboard is the heart of the app. Users can swipe between seven "screens" upon which they may place any number of virtual gauges. Gauge types include dials, half dials, bar displays, graphs, and digital readouts. These gauges can be set to monitor any of a number of metrics supplied by the phone's sensors (GPS, compass, barometer) or a connected OBD-II monitor (engine RPM, fuel flow rates, temperatures of coolants, oil, or intake air).

Users of Torque App can specify any grouping of these parameters along with GPS coordinates to be recorded via the apps' logging function. Users can e-mail their saved logs in KML format for importing into Google Earth or in a CSV format that can be imported into almost any spreadsheet editor for conversion to whatever sort of chart or graph you may need. One complaint that I have about Torque's interface is that it hides the toggle for initiating logging under a pop-up menu, which makes quickly starting a log difficult. I'd like the option to place a toggle log button right on the dashboard along with the rest of the gauges for easy access.

Torque App Features
Its users gain a many enhancements to the Realtime Information dashboard. For example, Torque App can also display calculated values (such as 0-60 time, trip distance, or quarter-mile times) derived from the raw data present in the app. After inputting vehicle-specific values for engine displacement, vehicle weight, and fuel type into a vehicle profile, Torque App can even calculate estimates for fuel economy, horsepower, and -- of course -- torque. Users can store multiple profiles for many different vehicles and store separate logs and dashboad layouts for each profile.

 Users of Torque App can map their vehicle speed on a Google Map. This could be useful for monitoring lap speeds or just for fun.

Torque App users also have the ability to share their gauges via Facebook or periodically broadcast location data or reported values to Twitter after logging in to either of these services.

Additionally, Torque App users gain other monitoring functions outside of the Realtime Information dashboard.

The View Map function displays a Google Map with a color-coded log of your last few trips. Green segments represent low speeds and red represents high speeds. Users can also choose to display G-forces or altitude logs on this map. The Check Fault Codes function performs a scan of the vehicle's diagnostics system and displays any error codes present. Test Results allows users to perform a similar check to make sure their vehicle's sensors are reporting properly. Finally, Graphing lets users plot data from any two vehicle sensors (for example, fuel pressure and engine RPM) on a chart for easy comparison.

In addition to the built-in functions, Torque App users can also install plug-ins to further extend the functionality of the Torque app. For example, one plug-in allows the app to display a widget on the Sony SmartWatch external display, another includes additional monitorable parameters that are specific to the Mazdaspeed3 and Mazdaspeed6 vehicles, while yet another adds a shift light to the mix.

Torque Lite is a free download in the Google Play Store. Torque App, with its support for plug-ins, vehicle profiles, and calculated values for power and efficiency, is $18.97.

We all, well at least, everyone who drives, have felt that second of irrational panic when the “engine fault” light on the dashboard suddenly lights up. It is, of course, recommended that you drop your car off at a service station as soon as possible, as in most cases you have no way to know where exactly the fault lies. Until now. With the Torque App for Android, checking fault codes is just one of the MANY things you can do.
How it works?
Apart from the application, you will need an OBDII Bluetooth adapter which plugs into your car’s diagnostics socket. The OBDII standard (On-Board Diagnostics) is found in most cars manufactured after 2000, but you should definitely check your vehicle information first. The Bluetooth adapter, once plugged into the socket connected to the ECU (Engine Control Unit), will then pair with your Android device, allowing you to access the many features provided by the app.
Features
While I love driving, I won’t even pretend to understand half of the extensive features this auto tuning application provides. That being said, here are a list of some that would be useful for everyone.
Dynamometer, horsepower, and torque gauges

• 0-60mph (0-100 kmph) speed timings
• CO2 emission readouts
• Extensive fault code database of various manufacturers
• Alarms and warnings
• Mileage (miles per gallon) information
• And more importantly, the ability to share screenshots on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
• Again, this is just a very short list of the multitude of features of this app, which you can find in the app description on the Google Play Store here.
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• Usage/Limitations
• Some features are limited to particular vehicle types. For example, a Turbo Boost feature is supported by cars that have MAP and MAF sensors such some VW and Audi cars.
• Should be compatible with an extensive manufacturer list which can be found in the app description but feature availability may vary depending on your particular vehicle’s ECU.
• The Bluetooth adapter can easily be gotten from us here

Conclusion

The Torque App is available on the Google Play Store here for $18.67. Regardless of which option you go for, there will be little investment required on your part as far as the OBDII Bluetooth adapter is concerned. You can also as us for any information about the application.
The app is very useful for a lot of people who are into cars. 4.8 Play Store rating speaks for itself. It does require little investment on your part, so I would recommend you get it without any further delay because it is sure that your car is compatible with it just as most cars.
By the time you’ve installed this application, let us know your experience in the comments section below.