I need to read vehicle steering angle (front wheel angle) data in real time for a research project that I am involved in. How can I achieve that? What HW and SW do I need for it?
So far I can think of 2 ways of doing it:
Option #1
Custom measurement hardware/sensor mounted directly on steering close to a front wheel. This may be rather complicated in terms of custom HW design and fitting it to the car. An advantage will be easy sensor reading since the sensor used would have a known output data format.
Option #2
Trying to read from the steering angle sensor (SAS) just on the steering wheel. I guess it can be read from CAN bus via OBD2 interface? I need to access the data from my C++ code in Linux.
I can purchase a used vehicle for the purposes of the project. Will someone have suggestions on vehicle makes and models which may be able to provide the SAS data? My location is the European Union. I would prefer Volkswagen Group vehicles (VW, Audi, Seat, Skoda) but that is not a must.
From what I have read only vehicles with Electronic Stability Control (ESC or ESP) are equipped with an SAS.
Edit:
After further search I found that steering angle data is not part of standard ODB PIDs so it can only be obtained with specialized software. This means the market will most likely be fragmented somehow. However, I also found the open source OpenXC platform by Ford, which makes steering wheel angle parameter available for some Ford vehicles. They even have a C library for interfacing to the vehicle.
