home assistant instance in a car

batvin123@reddthat.com to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 49 points –

Does anyone know a way to connect a car odb2 port directly to home assisant without the torque pro app?

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I am disappointed that this does not appear to be a post about building a server into your car.

I chose to set up grafana, mqtt, etc for an RV instead of home assistant. Little more lightweight for the raspberry pi 3 I used. Pulling together solar info, so we could see how long the AC would keep running on the road

back in the days of micro atx board i had a music server in my car to replace the radio that came with it.

I built a data logger a few years back. The data you likely want is on the CAN BUS network. You’ll need a CAN BUS hat for a pi or a pi with it baked in. There are other ways but you will likely end up realizing a pi or similar is best.

You’ll need to log the data while away from home and then sync the data when WiFi is available. Requiring the pi to stay powered after the car shuts off. Easy to do with some relays.

Depending on what data you are looking for it shouldn’t be too much work to get going on logging.

I don't know about homeassistant, but there's plenty of open source software to interact with odb2 at least for linux. With some tinkering it should be possible to have bluetooth enabled odb2 adapter where you can dump even raw data out and feed it to some other system of your choise, homeassistant included.

If you want live data from the drive itself you of course need to have some kind of recording device with you (raspberry pi comes to mind) but if you're happy just to log whatever is available when parking the car you could set up a computer with bluetooth nearby the parking spot on your yard and pull data from that. It may require that you keep the car powered on for a while after arrival to keep bus active, but some cars give at least some data via odb even when without the key being in ignition lock.