After being able to let Arduino access vehicle data through my Arduino OBD-II Kit, I was thinking of putting on a wireless module on the Arduino and transmitting the OBD-II data to a remote place. XBee is a good choice but its high-power version is rather expensive and difficult to obtain. I chose APC250 wireless module finally to make the attempt.
As I’ve wrote a program on PC to display OBD-II data from USB and Bluetooth ELM327 adapter in the past, it doesn’t take me a lot time to modify it to receive data from a APC250 module plugged on a small TTL-to-USB adapter. Actually to a PC program, communication with APC250 is just plain serial port communication. Arduino connects with the other APC250 module. I connect the Rx and Tx pins to Arduino’s D2 and D3 ports and use SoftwareSerial to perform serial communication as the hardware UART is used to retrieve data from OBD-II UART adapter.
There is no technical difficulty as long as the wireless modules can talk to each other in transparent serial communication, but it’s fun and possibly useful to send out the vehicle data to a remote place which can be up to 1.8km with this APC250.