Car Stats: Graphing with Powershell – Where Have I Been?

Previous posts in the series:

I could barely contain myself.  Thurday night, I had all kinds of data.. just calling my name.  

GPS Time, Device Time, Longitude, Latitude,GPS Speed(km/h), Horizontal Dilution of Precision, Altitude(m), Bearing, Gravity X(G), Gravity Y(G), Gravity Z(G),Miles Per Gallon(Instant)(mpg),GPS Altitude(m),Speed (GPS)(km/h),Run time since engine start(s),Speed (OBD)(km/h),Miles Per Gallon(Long Term Average)(mpg),Fuel flow rate/minute(cc/min),CO₂ in g/km (Average)(g/km),CO₂ in g/km (Instantaneous)(g/km)
Thu Jan 03 16:29:06 EST 2013,03-Jan-2013 16:29:11.133,-85.57728556666666,38.24568238333333,0.0,16.0,196.9,0.0,-0.015994536,0.9956599,0.0949334,0,196.9,0,17,0,31.66748047,19.45585442,259.47247314,-
Thu Jan 03 16:29:09 EST 2013,03-Jan-2013 16:29:14.004,-85.57729401666667,38.245684716666666,0.0,12.0,195.2,0.0,-0.015994536,0.9956599,0.0949334,0,195.2,0,20,0,31.66731453,45.80973816,259.47247314,-

Friday afternoon, once work things were completed, I started playing with it.  To start, I tried to read in the CSV file into Powershell.   I figured once I had it there, I could do *something* with it.

I faced some challenges:

  • The CSV column names are not “clean”, so I needed to sanitize them
  • Some files did not have certain pieces of data.
  • CSV import was a string, needed to be casted to a number before certain operations (“137” –gt 80.0 = false)
  • The units are fixed, part of the Torque app. (Actually, part of the OBDII standard)

After getting it read in, I looked around for a graphing library. Turns out I can use System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization with Powershell. (thank you sir), which had some fun stuff:

  • FastPoint ignores colors
  • Had to turn off auto-scale on the Y-Axis
  • Made the charting controll Dock-Fill in the form

I ended up with this script:

$alldata = @(); 
$files = gci . -r -include "trackLog.csv"
foreach ($file in $files) { 
   $lines = get-content $file
   "Processing {0}: {1} lines" -f $file, $lines.count
   
   # to get around errors with header names not being valid object names
   $lines[0] = $lines[0] -ireplace '[^a-z,]','' 
   
   $data = ($lines | convertfrom-csv)
   $alldata = $alldata + $data
}
"Total of {0} items" -f $alldata.count

$speedmeasure = $alldata | measure-object GpsSpeedKmh -min -max
$speedspread = $speedmeasure.Maximum - $speedmeasure.Minimum
if ($speedspread -le 1.0) { $speedspread = 1.0 }

$mpgmeasure = $alldata | measure-object MilesPerGallonInstantmpg -min -max
$mpgspread = $mpgmeasure.Maximum - $mpgmeasure.Minimum
if ($mpgspread -le 1.0) { $mpgspread = 1.0 }

$ffmeasure = $alldata | where-object { $_.Fuelflowrateminuteccmin -ne "-" } | measure-object Fuelflowrateminuteccmin -min -max
$ffspread = $ffmeasure.Maximum - $ffmeasure.Minimum
if ($ffspread -le 1.0) { $ffspread = 1.0 }

[void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization")
$chart = new-object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.Chart
$chart.width = 800
$chart.Height = 600
$chart.Left = 40
$chart.top = 30
$chart.Name = "Foo"

$chartarea = new-object system.windows.forms.datavisualization.charting.chartarea
$chart.ChartAreas.Add($chartarea)

$legend = New-Object system.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.Legend
$chart.Legends.Add($legend)

$series = $chart.Series.Add("Series1")
$series = $chart.Series["Series1"]
#FastPoint ignores color
$series.ChartType = [System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.SeriesChartType]::Point
$series.IsXValueIndexed = $false

foreach ($data in $alldata)
{
    if ($data.MilesPerGallonInstantMpg -eq $null) { continue } 
    if ($data.Fuelflowrateminuteccmin -eq $null) { continue } 
    if ($data.Fuelflowrateminuteccmin -eq "-") { continue } 

    $speed = (([double]$data.GpsSpeedkmh              - $speedmeasure.Minimum) / $speedspread)  
    $mpg =   (([double]$data.MilesPerGallonInstantMpg -    $mpgspread.Minimum) /   $mpgspread)
    $ff    = (([double]$data.Fuelflowrateminuteccmin  -    $ffmeasure.Minimum) /    $ffspread)
    
    $higherspeed = $speed; 
    if ($higherspeed -gt 0.05) { $higherspeed = [Math]::Sqrt($speed) }
    $lowerspeed = $speed * $speed; 
    
    # MPG numbers seem to be clustered closer to 0 with a few annoying outlyers. spread them up a bit.
    #if ($mpg -gt 0.05) { $mpg = [Math]::Sqrt($mpg) }    

    # calculate color.   
    $blue = 250*$ff;
    
    # slower = more red
    # faster = more green
    # medium = yELLOW!
    $red = 250 - (250 * $lowerspeed)
    $green = 250 * $higherspeed
    
    $datapoint = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.DataPoint($data.Longitude, $data.Latitude)   
    $color = [System.Drawing.Color]::FromARgb(125,$red, $green, $blue)
    
    $datapoint.Color = $color
    $series.Points.Add($datapoint)
    $datapoint.MarkerSize = ($mpg)*5 + 1
}

$chartarea.AxisY.IsStartedFromZero=$false

$Form = New-Object Windows.Forms.Form 
$Form.Text = "PowerShell Chart" 
$Form.Width = 1100 
$Form.Height = 600 
$Form.controls.add($Chart) 
$Chart.Dock = "Fill" 
$Form.Add_Shown({$Form.Activate()}) 
$Form.ShowDialog()

Which reads everything in, scrubs some data, figures some transforms, and yields me the following pretty picture:

image_thumb5

  • Green = faster, Red = slower.
  • Blue = Gas used (doesn’t show very well)
  • Fatter = Better MPG (I should reverse this, probably)
  • The green lines are the interstates (I71, I264, I64, and I265 shown)
  • Stop lights show up as little red dots.
  • I had to hand-scale the window till it looked right. Real co-ordinate systems some other day.

I would like to do this in 3-D, but I haven’t gotten my Processing chops quite figured out yet. Maybe next week!

Author: sunnywiz

Me.

2 thoughts on “Car Stats: Graphing with Powershell – Where Have I Been?”

  1. Awesome job, been using Torque logs and Powershell the past few weeks for a project and had a ton of issues with datatypes. All the Device time and GPS time needed to be cast into datetime formats so that PowerShell could perform math for length of trips..etc… And all the data in the logs start as strings that have to be cast into correct datatypes in order to complete any calculation. That tied in with the complex column names made me want to contact the developer and slap him. Overall tho, being able to plot coordinates using a script is awesome 🙂

    1. *nods*, i haven’t picked this geekyness up in a while, so your memory bank is more up to speed than mine, but if i recall correctly, there are actually two sets of logs:

      a) the logs that torque always creates, even if you don’t really tell it what to log .. for its own internal purposes
      b) the logs that you tell it to create.

      The former have very fixed column names and very specific units; the latter are more dependent on the units you specify and the items you want to log.
      The former are always one file per engine session, the latter honor the “ignore stops for less than 5 minutes” setting etc

      When I wrote my scripts, i didn’t realize it at first, but i was parsing from the former, rather than the latter. I never did get around to trying to handle times.

      Do you have a blog post about your project i could read up on?

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