DataDriven is an end-to-end vehicle data tracking system that

  1. collects vehicle data (vehicle speed, engine RPM, fuel levels, etc.), location data (latitude/longitude), and IMU data (acceleration in x/y/z)
  2. uploads data to the cloud over LTE-M
  3. processes data and serves it an an API
  4. displays data on a front-end live with an interactive map
  5. provides a data viz tool to view historic data in time series charts

Check out the demo!

Here is an overview of our system with a block diagram:

Tracker Module: steps (1) and (2) outlined above are accomplished by a custom PCB we designed that sits on the dash of the car. It collects data from and is powered by the vehicle’s OBD-II diagnostic port. It gets location data and LTE-M access via the nRF9160 SoC’s onboard LTE/GNSS modem. Data is aggregated and marshalled into a UDP datagram before being sent to a UDP server.

Backend: step (3) is achieved by a UDP server (dubbed UDP Listener) that receives data from the tracker, unmarshalls it, and decodes it before saving it to a database. An API (api.datadrivenucsb.com) then serves data from the database at various endpoints (e.g. /live/car_id for the latest data of a vehicle, /fetch_all/car_id for historical vehicle data). The UDP Listener and API are deployed on an EC2 instance on AWS and an RDS instance is used for the database.

Frontend: steps (4) and (5) are implemented with a front-end Web App developed in Flutter and deployed on Google’s Firebase Hosting. The front-end has an interactive map that places markers as vehicle positions are updated live. It displays a sidebar with the latest vehicle data that was collected through the OBD-II port and IMU. The data visualization page allows users to query a specific vehicle parameter for vehicle(s) over a period of time and plot it in a time series chart.

For more details on the project and team, and access to the presentation materials (slides and a poster), check out our about page: about.datadrivenucsb.com.

This is a project for the 2023 UC Santa Barbara Computer Engineering Capstone program.

Awards: 🏆 Distinguished Technical Achievement in CE (2nd Place)