[nebk] wrote in with a project that used a CANbus dongle (originally a design by Hackaday's own Eric Evenchick!) to read the vitals of an experimental competition car. 

CANbus is actually pretty versatile, and the transceiver chips take care of a lot of the hassle for you for very little money.  You probably don't want CANbus for a single sensor, but once you get past a few, it might make sense.  Of course, if you're doing automobile stuff, it's a good fit.

"My freshman year we moved to a CAN interface based (http://canable.io/), we had to recompile the Linux kernel in order to get CAN to work with the tablet, but since the tablet was a Nexus 7, it wasn’t too bad as far as I know. From there the team wrote a custom QT app to display the sensor data in a dashboard and stream it back to the server (https://github.com/HEEV)."