Car engine enhancement with Max and OBD-II

Much of our driving experience is wrapped up in sounds that happen when you press the pedal to the metal. Like Superman emerging from a phone booth, this 2006 Jetta seems different.  The project connects RPM data from an OBD2 diagnostic sensor with the input of the car radio. Via synthesizers.

[update 11/2013 – source code is available at https://github.com/tkzic/automax  – this version features

  • V8 engine
  • Jet engine
  • Spaceship
  • Star Trek TOS transporter button
  • Korg nano-control Midi controller interface]

This project uses the RPM data from an automobile OBD-II port to control the engine speed of an engine simulation from Andy Farnell’s book “Designing Sound”

Here’s the patch that polls and translates OBD-II data

patch is tkzic/automax/rpm4.maxpat

Here’s a Max version of the Farnell car engine simulation:

patch is tkzic/automax/waveguide_engine2e-1.maxpat