Make your car smart with homeassistant

Feature Requests
1

Hi there,
i will get my new car in about 3 weeks and i would like to integrate it with home-assistant. So i started to search for an integration in HA. There is yet nothing ready available for my car brand. I continued searching and found a company with an universial API for a lot of car vendors an a free plan with limited API calls per day. It is SmartCar. So i don’t get money from them, but i think this could be a very helpful integration for a lot of HA-users because of its wide range of supported cars.

I have a very limited knowledge in programming so i cant develop it on my own but hopefully there are so developers around that are interested in their cars position, fuel level and tire pressure…

@balloob I am not shure but possibly it would help to “push” the people from SmartCar to support home-assistant.

2

I second this. It would be great to use it to lock my vehicle nightly. However the coding is beyond my ability.

2 Likes
3

With some searching I found this:

But the README is limited on getting everything set up to grab your vehicle info. Not sure if someone smarter than I can figure it out. Would also love to get it working for my Chevy Truck for some simple automations

4

I can confirm the above Cquential/SmartCar-Integration instructions are indeed quite unclear.

Has anyone gotten any further on this? Just stumbled upon Smartcar.com myself and I’m itching to see what it can do. I’ve been disappointed that there isn’t an official (or even unofficial) Lexus integration yet, so to find a possible alternative is pretty exciting.

5

I have a chevrolet that can lock and start the car with the “mychevrolet” app, and also an aftermarket remote starter in the other car using “MyCar Controls”. I can’t figure out how to integrate them at all to Home Assistant. I thought of a way to integrate it would be to use Alexa and Alexa Media Player. There are Alexa skills that I can use to control the vehicle, but the skill needs a voice PIN to trigger anything. I understand the voice pin to unlock, but to lock seems a bit overkill. Because of needing these voice PINs in Alexa, I can’t make that work. Using tasker to somehow activate the android phone app might work, but I haven’t dug too far into that. I really just want to automate locking the cars at night.

6

I recently read somewhere that you can use a combination of HomeKit and/or GoogleHome to bypass the need to provide a PIN to an Alexa routine. I’ll try to find it again when I get home from work, but thought you’d be happy to at least know its possible.

1 Like
7

Thanks, definitely interested, I think I can get Homekit going if it can do this

Update:

Found this to get the Chevy working - works great, I can start, stop, lock, and unlock

Just need to find something else for the aftermarket Mycarcontrol one - , that will be trickier.

8

Hi all, on this topic
If you don’t mind, I’d like to bounce some ideas off y’all. If this has already been done and made, be kind and point a fella in the right direction, thanks.

So it’s great there are API’s for modern/smart vehicles as was shared above. Yet I have a 20 year old GM vehicle which I love (don’t judge :D) and I would love even more to smartify it.

So, specifically I am looking to add the following capabilities preferably with some kind of all-in=one custom device, which can be wired into the vehicle.

  • Track the vehicle in real-time (like one can do with phones in the HA map)
  • Measure a few ODB2 parameters (speed, rpm fuel, battery volts, etc)
  • Activate horn, locks and other peripherals with relays
  • Ability to read states like current gear (not sure if that is available via ODB2?)

I’ve seen various partial solutions, like I own a bluetooth ODB2 adaptor and the Torque app for android and have studied the ability for the Torque app to upload/stream data to HA over a data connection,

Trying to approach this from a K.I.S.S. perspective, I am leaning towards some combo of a spare mobile with a data plan, mounted somewhere in the vehicle, running the HA app, as the phone in parallel could run Torque, picking up the measurements I want from the Bluetooth ODB2 adapter.

A phone based setup would obviously see to power management, comms, gps and the Torque part, albeit there are some obvious ‘plotholes’

The last piece missing, is somehow hooking up that phone to a GPIO module (like an ESP or Arduino) to be able to read inputs and write outputs, and somehow transmogrifying those into binary_sensors and switches in HA (Honestly this is the part I haven’t thought through)

If you have any good ideas or suggestions how one might accomplish this, or hey perhaps there is an even simpler method or some 30 dollar alibaba gadget which can get the job done, either way - I’m all ears and open to suggestions!