I have a proposal for making almost perfect solution for fuel economy gauge/computer.
The MPGuino kit is a very cheep and nice device providing just enough info for monitoring things related to fuel consumption, especially for the older generation vehicles which do not have OBDII. However, to put a small LCD on your vehicle is not an easy task if you want to keep a good look of your car's interior and options for keeping history or uploading data to the web are also very limited if possible at all at the moment. The best monitor I think would be to transmit the real-time data to the more serious devices such as PC, PDA, Smartphone, etc. The most comfortable way would be to modify the current design so that we could hook a simple serial Bluetooth module to MPGuino board and use it instead of USB. Most of todays PCs, PDAs, Smartphones etc. has Bluetooth as de facto standard and the communication is as simple as with USB connection. Since MPGuino already sends processed data via serial link twice a second, we do not need to write complicated software. It is only the simple terminal needed to read Bluetooth serial port on PC, PDA etc. and show the info on the screen. I think once this step of integrating Bluetooth is made, the monitor software can be created practically in minutes on any platform, be it Palm, iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc.
If Bluetooth module integration is not an easy solution, then maybe it is possible to use Arduino BT version for MPGuino, however, the price difference makes it not so afordable at the moment.
