Hi everyone,
Building on my first experience creating a smart wine cellar package powered by Gemini on the free tier (using the Gemini API on the free plan), I had put together, for my own personal use, a vehicle maintenance logbook package to track the upkeep of my household’s vehicles. It’s genuinely useful to me day to day, for taking care of the household’s cars and bikes and not forgetting anything, so I turned it into a full-fledged HACS integration with its own Lovelace card, with Claude’s help to make it all look nice and to translate it into a few languages for anyone interested.
In the same spirit as the wine cellar, I looked for extra features that would add real value compared to a plain Excel spreadsheet, and here’s what I ended up implementing:
- When you add a vehicle via the card, a maintenance plan specifically tailored to the car is generated, based on manufacturer documentation and garage recommendations, with due dates specific to the vehicle (and its engine/trim, which auto-completes based on year/model/brand), drawn from a hard-coded catalog (one catalog per category: car / motorcycle-scooter / e-bike).
- Along the way, manufacturer recalls are checked and displayed, and a panel lists the technical points to watch out for on that specific model, gathered from user forums and garage feedback.
- A notification reminds you to update the mileage counter in the integration at your own pace, or you can directly link an HA sensor for automatic updates (for recent connected vehicles, or via an OBD adapter fed into HA, for example). Upcoming due dates are shown on the card with a gauge, and a notification is sent when a due date is exceeded (in time and in mileage).
- An estimated cost for the operation at a garage is displayed, alongside an estimated cost if you want to do it yourself (DIY), and a difficulty indicator for the operation is shown, along with the required tools and an explanation of the points to watch out for in the maintenance panel.
- The vehicle’s value is also tracked, with its evolution based on mileage, along with an explanation of the estimate.
Of course everything is configurable — if you ever want to add checks or mark others as not applicable to your vehicle, that’s possible. And as a bonus, 4 visual themes are built in for the aesthetically inclined.
I’m attaching a small screenshot showing the expanded Lovelace card:
If you’d like to use this integration, the full feature list and installation instructions are on the GitHub below (the French text comes after the English text) — let me know if it’s useful and if you have any ideas for improvements: