Per question, can the dongle be used with a pi as a OBDII dongle without autopi core?
I kind of gave up last year after being disappointed by a number of things (e.g. all the cool features were not available except for beta testers, had to keep emailing to activate after each time I reinstalled device, etc).
Anyway, now I’m thinking I’ll just do my own thing, but I wanted to check whether I can just use the autopi dongle on a linux build to read signals through OBDII port, or whether there is some proprietary or other mechanism that requires autopi core to be running?
I’m sorry to hear that you have given up on our Core. We do believe that the AutoPi core is the best way forward for you AutoPi. We do continuously development on the core and a lot of updates has been released since you last tried.
But to answer your question. Yes, the device is in its essence a Pi with a lot of peripherals. This means that you can put any image on the device. Simply remove the SD card from the device and flash whatever you want to it. Since the AutoPi Core is open source, it means that you can event use the parts of the AutoPi core you like for your own image. So, there is really no limitations to how you can approach this.