Bumping this before it gets forgotten 😉

Hmmm in theory, if you log both the wheelspeed and engine RPM, and know the gearratios and work out the wheelsize/diff ratio, you can divide the RPM by the wheelspeed times the diff ratio, and this figure should correspond to the gearratio of whatever gear you are in!

In practice, easiest way to do it would require some sort of calibration mode I think, ie, you would need to drive at steady speed in 1st gear, and manually enter that you are in 1st, then repeat for 2nd/3rd etc. I might actually give this a shot this evening when I’m driving home, ie log both the OBD speed and RPM, and then drive in each of the gears for a set period of time and record when that is, and simple work out the ratio these two, and this figure should be a different constant for each gear!

I then suppose you could make a custom PID which samples:

(RPM/Wheelspeed)X gear ratio formula,

where the gear ratio formula related the actual gear you are in to the 5 calibrated constants that were measured. If you just truncate this value to an integer, It would just give out a 1,2,3,4,5 for each gear.

Of course the above will not work during clutch slip etc, and how well it will work with an automatic I don’t know.

Ok thank you guys for the info. Now then the hunt is on for those elusive Chrysler PIDs……. 😉

The best place is to find them publically accessible on the internet (which is where I’ve been building up my (slightly limited) lists from as I find people talking about them on forums after google searching *lots!*

Ive searched high and low for the PID for a Mazda 5 for gears. I know on your competitor( command and dash, the opposite way) they have it sort of working with gear ratios, min rpm, max rpm, shiftpoint and wheel size.

I need to change the equation parser to be able to pull data from other PIDs…. as quite a few people have asked, I will see if I can squeeze it into this weekends release

You’re correct about documentation being a little sparse. I’ve been keen on developing the app to make it as powerful as possible, and most good programmers can’t document their code very well :-), however, I might put something on the wiki once I’ve partitioned it a little more and then hopefully open it up so others can add useful information (I hope!). The Equations bit needs documenting. I will try to do this in the next couple of weeks once the parser has been updated.

Quote from admin on May 23, 2011
It wouldn’t work on an automatic at all, which is why I’ve not done it

What you actually want is the PID for the current gear. GM vehicles have this (its part of the predefined PID lists in the advanced settings), unfortunately for other vehicles it’s a case of going hunting for the relevant PID on interweb forums!
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Has there been any luck on this?

I’m looking into replacing my car stereo with an android tablet, and one of the things I was hoping to do is detect when I shift into reverse, to automatically activate a backup camera.

Quote from Pwned-PS3 on May 23, 2011
Hi Ian,

I am not sure whether this is possible but I was wondering if you could add a feature where Torque can display the gear one is on. This would be particularly useful for some of the vehicles that do not show which gear the vehicle is on in the dashboard. This would prabably only be applicable to vehicles with Automatic Transmission….. My Jeep does not have the gear shift display and sometimes I cant tell whether I am on Gear 3 or 4 or Over-drive and would love to see this info.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the brilliant app.

I have a Smart Brabus Roadster which has a semi-auto box with paddle shift, it has an lcd display to show which gear you are in with up and down arrows to suggest gear change, so I’m assuming this info is in the SAM unit.

However, the display is quite small and tiresome to read, I have seen a large colour gear display on a Ferrari, perfect if you can afford one

Perhaps you could add this feature to Torque Lite

people, please, read the full thread before posting!
The author already explained above that there is no generic way to get this information. If you want it to get for your particular vehicle – search on forums for your car for the PID with gear number.

I also need some things to get from my car, but the author of Torque just doesn’t have that kind of information for all cars, so it makes no sense to ask him “add this particular parameter for my car” – even if he will make it, he will later get more questions/complaints like “this parameter doesn’t work for my/other car”….