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I have a 2004 SL600 that I would like to be able to monitor Boost Pressure, Inlet Air Temperature, and Fuel/Air ratio while driving. These are pretty critical parameters to watch on a turbocharged car with an intercooler. Can anyone recommend anything for this purpose? Autometer makes an OBD-II plug in device that can transmit quite a bit of operating gauge information to an iPhone or Android phone wirelessly. It has beautiful looking and user-configurable gauges, but the product has fatal flaws (most gauges not working, flaky wireless connectivity, slow response times on the few gauges that do work, etc.). I didn't try it on my SL600, because it failed miserably on two other boosted cars AND set off a check engine light on one of those two cars. The Autometer OBD-II Gauge is known as an Autometer Dashlink 2.0 Module 6036; you can see it at www.summitracing.com and on the autometer.com web site.
If nothing else, I hope to locate and install at least a fuel/air ratio gauge and senders to be certain the SL600 is getting enough fuel while under boost. I guess I will need to install one sender on each exhaust manifold. I am not looking forward to that complex installation. For a simpler solution, are there other OBD-II readers/digital gauges similar to the Autometer product?
I use a ScanGauge II, shows boost and inlet air temp for sure. Haven’t tried to see fuel/air ratio but it should. Plug into OBD-II port and get a holder to keep it on the dash. I have a small cellphone spring-loaded device that slides onto a dash vent louver.
You can’t get the torque app if you have an iPhone. I use the OBD Fusion app. It works ok, but there seems to be some lag that affects the accuracy of the data. Not that big of a deal if you are monitoring something like IATs, but it’s not great at measuring peak boost. I’m using it with a Veepeak dongle.
It does data log and you can export the data to excel.
Is it not responsive enough to measure the boost level in PSI? For TXDaveSki: the ScanGauge II doesn't have the gauge type readouts that I am looking for, and its setup for a Boost level reader appears to be brutal, but how responsive and accurate is it for measuring boost level in PSI when driving?
I am thinking of purchasing and testing a fancy, but expensive (around $400) Edge Insight CTS3 scanner/gauge device on Amazon:
The CTS3 is an OBD-2 reader with a dedicated 5 inch screen and a large set of user-configurable analog gauges, including boost level, inlet air temperature, oil temperature, etc. etc. It is reviewed pretty favorably on some turbo-diesel truck forums and is available on Amazon as shown in the long link just above. Hopefully it will work better than the bug-filled Autometer device that I mentioned in my first post. If no one else chimes in with some other recommendations within a few days, I'll purchase the CTS3 reader and report back in this thread. Thanks again for your posts on some alternatives.
Yep, that’s the exact dongle that I have. Seems to be decent quality.
Heres a partial screenshot from a data logging file. The far left column is the amount of time that has passed since the beginning of the drive. At 814.894 seconds and 815.862 seconds it logged 14.93889lbs of boost and the RPM was 3417. There’s no way that boost and RPM stayed constant for a full second. So it seems like there are times where the data is changing too quickly for the app and/or dongle to record it.
The column to the left of boost is intake air temperature in Fahrenheit.
Thanks for the rapid reply with the detailed comma separated value file. Those numbers look pretty believable and it looks like you are getting a full boost level near 15 psi or so. I hope to see something similar on my SL600 when I get some instrumentation on it. My car certainly feels strong to me. Have you been able to measure the Inlet Air Temperature with your setup?
I have an SL65 so my peak boost should be closer to 20, you can see that I continued accelerating after 815.862s and the app never captured the peak because one second later I was at 3655rpm and had let off the throttle, hence the -12 vacuum. So I probably actually got up to around 4000rpm or more before letting off the gas, which wasn’t captured.
That's still a lot of boost under 4000 rpm! Have you ever temporarily hooked up a mechanical boost gauge to your car to verify the accuracy of your OBD-2 readings?
I have not. I have a STAR diagnostic system and might eventually check how similar it’s measurements are to the phone app.
If you end up data logging I’d be interested to see your intake air temps. I’ve become a little obsessed with IATs since the car is so much faster when they are low. With the stock bosch pump mine were 30-70f over ambient. I’m in the process of upgrading to a Pierburg CWA100, wired to run 100% of the time and should have the car back on the road later this month, I’m hoping to see a significant improvement.
important is the OBD plug you use with Torque
I have tested over 6 and the best is the Carly
it also support a real AUTO standby that way you leave it permanenly
03-05-2021, 02:39 PM
