Fuel Management App Idea for Armbian – Need Feedback!

[Danuta]

Hello everyone!
I’m new to the forum and recently set up Armbian on my Orange Pi using the latest July 2025 image. I’m working on a user-space application to monitor fuel consumption for IoT projects involving vehicle fleets, like optimizing diesel trucks. I’m thinking of something that could run via armbian-config or as a Python script, pulling data from fuel sensors.

So far, my idea is to log consumption data and calculate efficiency based on user input. I’ve tried Grafana, but it lacks a dedicated fuel calculator—kalkulatorpaliwa.com.pl could serve as a starting point for a simple interface. I’m unsure how to approach this on Armbian—should I use Python with Matplotlib, or go for a lighter option like Bash with awk?

I’ll share a basic startup script if someone helps me get started! What tools do you recommend for building such apps on Armbian? Has anyone worked on a similar fuel monitoring project with SBCs? What challenges might I face with sensor integration? Looking forward to your suggestions—I plan to start testing this week!

[umiddelb]

homeassistant ?

[robertoj]

Sensor integration: buy a OBD2 to USB adapter and study the OBD2 codes to read the fuel liters/hour, km and km/h. It is very possible there is a python OBD2 library.

 

The SBC should be running continuously in the vehicle, since the car electronic control unit does not have the memory to store the information for you.

 

Python+tkinter/pyqt6+matplotlib is very effective for this kind of apps.