Nowadays cars are very essential elements in people's life, and it's maintenance has a great consideration. In the early 1980s a new systems that helps in car maintenance has been introduced which is an on-board diagnostics system "OBD" a self diagnostic and reporting system, it gives the repair technician and the car owner the ability to access the health information of the vehicle, sensors and many parameters, this system has been envolved and now it became a manadatory requirement in the car industry. The OBD system is devided into two parts car-side part the communiacte with the car subsystems, record data and respont to data requests and the other part in the user side that communicate with the car side part, request data, and provide it to the user.
Here in the project we are going to implement the user side part that is named OBD scanner. OBD scanner is a standalone device that provide car diagnostics and reporting capability through a user-friendly interface. The system devided into two parts: Graphical LCD that views information visually, keypad for user interaction, EEPROM that stores error code-description mapping tables and other info, communication interface that represent the physical interface between OBD scanner and the car engine control unit "ECU" and finally the PIC microcontroller that will maintain processing task and will control the operation of the previous parts.
Our OBD scanner has a spetial property that differentiates it from the existing OBD scanners which is the Arabic support, this property will help Arabic-speaking technitians who has a problem in English language to benefit from technology.