Torque for Android review

[BlueFoot]

It works great on a nexus 7. I was able to replace all my gauges with the tablet. But honestly it's not that practical. I wanted to use it for other things too.

My phone heats up a lot when I use torque on it. I believe it uses gps the whole time because of the route logging features, and it has tons of other stuff going on too. But it works well. But again, I use my phone for other stuff so it's somewhat of a pain to set it up everytime I get in the car. I can see how a dedicated monitoring system would be better. But for the money, if you have patience, the torque app + bluetooth obdII can't be beat.

[bentring]

I love the Torque app, although I don't use it every time I get in the car, mainly because I'm too lazy to swap between Torque and internet radio from the same device when I want to skip songs.

[Xist]

I had Dad's phone mounted in Chorizo, not specifically to monitor my economy, but it gave that information. Before the phone was stolen two months ago, it had warmed enough that it stopped charging. I figured that a black phone in a black car in Arizona was a bad combination. When I get another phone, I want to install a dedicated USB charger, if I can just splice in a cord, that would be great. I want to put in a sun shield and honestly have been considering installing a small fan or two.

[bentring]

I've been considering something like this for a dedicated car charger.

[KFM]

Originally Posted by Xist

I had Dad's phone mounted in Chorizo, not specifically to monitor my economy, but it gave that information. Before the phone was stolen two months ago, it had warmed enough that it stopped charging. I figured that a black phone in a black car in Arizona was a bad combination. When I get another phone, I want to install a dedicated USB charger, if I can just splice in a cord, that would be great. I want to put in a sun shield and honestly have been considering installing a small fan or two.

A sun shield and some rain guards for my windows does it here in FL. My car spends all day parked on the roof of a garage and it's actually pretty agreeable when I get in. For reference, it was around 95 degrees when I left work yesterday.

However, my car is out of commission for a bit, so I can't say how warm it would have been yesterday, but on days with similar temps, it hasn't been too bad.

[mixu-]

Originally Posted by bentring

I love the Torque app, although I don't use it every time I get in the car, mainly because I'm too lazy to swap between Torque and internet radio from the same device when I want to skip songs.

I have Torque running in the background all the time, so I don't need to even touch it and it logs all my data and automatically sends it to a server.

So the official web app at http://ian-hawkins.com:8080/ isn't that great, but there's an alternative, here: https://github.com/econpy/torque/

The UI of the alternative isn't that special either, but here's the thing - it uses a mysql database that you can access directly (as opposed to the official web service which doesn't let you do that).

Soo, when you have data in a mysql database and you want a nice way of crunching it, what do you do? Excel! I now have an excel spreadsheet that automatically updates with new data every time I drive my car. How cool is that!

Here are a couple of charts I made based on data from about a week of driving.

[fostereo2000]

interesting

[seifrob]

Hallo everybody,

I am happy Torque app user and as I have juste re-discovered this thread, I feel I should share my experience here, because the app has evolved since the original post was written.
I use Torque on my regular bottom-line cell phone (sony xperia E) for my daily driving to get extra gauges I dont have in regular cluster (real coolant temp, instant consumption, engine load, etc. Sometimes i use it to log how I drive and to review what works best under certain conditions.
Now: key settings for that use

- For normal use, GPS is not needed. The app will show a warning message, but you can even supress this message in the setting. My default setting is GPS off and supressed warning. Thus conserving my cellphone battery.
- In the settings, you can configure Torque to enable bluetooth when started and disable bluetooth when quit. again, it conserves battery life and your time.
- in the settings, you can configure Torque to skip welcome screen and go directly to gauges.
- torque has two logging features - first is online, it uploads live data do some internet server (or twitter, or facebook or whatever) I have this disabled by default thus conserving battery and my mobile data. The other option is to store logs to file in your phone. I have set this off by default, it is possible to turn the feature on from the gauge screen. Hopefully will have time to write about logging more sometimes later.

Having set Torque as suggested, what I do when I get into car is:
- put my phone into holder
- click the Torque app on the screen
Everything else goes automatically, Torque enables a bluetooth, finds OBD2 adaptor, connects it and starts shoving gauges.
When leaving the car I just remove the phone and quit the app.

When I want log my route, I enable GPS, start the app and when I want to drive, run from menu command "enable logging"

Having use Torque like this, I never ran into battery draining trouble, the biggest draw when using torque came from having the display lit all the time. But hey, you can switch it off and set torque to make audible warning when something happens.