If you are looking for a way to pull live vehicle telemetry—like State of Charge, RPM, tire pressures, or raw CAN frames—and route it seamlessly into your smart home or custom servers, you are in the right place. Docs located at: Home · WiCAN Docs
What is the WiCAN Pro?
At its core, the WiCAN Pro is a powerful, ESP32-S3-based OBD2 and CAN bus interface. It plugs directly into your vehicle's diagnostic port and acts as a bridge between your car's internal networks and your Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices. It supports standard OBD2 protocols (via an ELM327-compatible interpreter) as well as raw CAN bus monitoring and injection.
Why the Forked Edition?
The original (stock) WiCAN firmware was great for basic polling, but it relied on a "flat list" architecture. Every PID was polled blindly on a timer, which often resulted in network spam, slow update rates, and unnecessary battery drain when the car was off. Also, the stock documentation was dated and incomplete. I have created new Docs covering botht he stock and super charged functionality. See Home · WiCAN Docs
This Forked Edition completely rewrites the automation and networking engines. It transforms the WiCAN Pro from a simple OBD scanner into a highly intelligent, edge-computing telemetry node. If you wish to try out the WiCAN Pro forked firmware see the release Wambs Forked Firmware Releases
Core Performance & Polling
Grouped PIDs: Clusters PIDs with the same initialization strings to cut polling overhead by up to 80%, delivering fast, synchronized data snapshots.
"On Change" Transmission: Dramatically reduces cellular data usage and MQTT broker spam by only transmitting when a PID's value actually changes.
Expression Hex Support: Allows raw hex strings over MQTT to bypass integer limits, simplifying the decoding of complex multi-byte data (like TPMS packets) in Home Assistant.
Network & Connectivity
Native Tailscale Integration: Authenticate the ESP32 directly to your Tailscale mesh. Easily punches through cellular CGNAT and Starlink connections without requiring complex port forwarding.
Scheduled Wake-Up Time: Configure specific network wake-up schedules, allowing the device to automatically power up, connect, and report telemetry at designated times even when the vehicle is parked and off.
Failover Webhooks: Supports primary and secondary URLs, seamlessly falling back from a local IP to an external Nabu Casa link if the primary connection drops.
Static IP & Custom AP SSIDs: Assign a fixed IP to bypass DHCP issues and broadcast a custom Wi-Fi SSID directly from the dongle.
UI & Device Management
MQTT On-Demand Group Toggling: Turn specific groups of PIDs on or off on the fly directly via MQTT commands from Home Assistant (perfect for switching polling profiles based on whether the car is driving or charging).
Group Play/Test Button: The Web UI now includes a dedicated play/test button to instantly fire off and validate entire groups of PIDs at once, rather than forcing you to test them individually.
Revamped Web Interface: Features a drag-and-drop workflow for managing, moving, or temporarily disabling PIDs without needing to edit complex JSON files.
One-Click PID Importing: Quickly import standard or vehicle-specific PIDs directly into your active groups using UI copy buttons.
Power & Stability
Advanced Low-Voltage Protection: Automatically pauses polling if the 12V battery drops below a custom threshold, and resumes when the alternator recharges it.
Sleep & Wakeup Fixes: Patches unexpected network-triggered wakeups (like WireGuard/Netif) that can inadvertently drain the car battery.
Restart Tracker: Protects the hardware by automatically forcing the device into deep sleep if a continuous bootloop is detected.
Hi
Thanks for the share but would be great if they started to ship the GSM/LTE module to goes with it as it's quite annoying to use it till then (share data connection of cellphone or other device in car
Vincèn
Yep, I agree 100%. At least you can setup all the PIDs you want to get ready for the ESPNetLink.
The author of the device, Mr. MeatPI, had issues with the first batch ( ESPNetLink) he was testing, so he had to have the HW reworked. Now, the ship date is Jul 31, 2026. The original date was April 2026 that I remember.
Yeah I was quite surprised to read that and he had not a prototype working not earlier I was really expecting it to be able to use at least my Wican pro that sleeps on shelf for a while now !
Yes I was about to say, the estimated date for mine was August 17th.... but I just got an email from Mouser they shipped it today and I should be getting it by 6/23! :-)... So maybe yours will be here before you know it
Yes, changes to the stock firmware are merged into the forked edition. I was hoping that my changes would get merge back into the stock firmware. However, there are too many changes. I have made push requests to the Author of the stock firmware, but he said there are no many changes.
Wow I guess I am one of the lucky 7! That's never happened to me before. Now of course I am going to start second-guessing myself, wondering if it's old left over version of the hardware, etc., etc., lol
Very psyched with this. It’s really just a toy for me at this point. I connect to it only in my old car form the driveway to the nearest access point when it starts before pulling out of the driveway and then when arriving back home before shutting off. It collects enough data so that I now have alerts for:
Low Fuel
Low battery
Overheating
Reminder to turn off car if sitting idling for more than 5 min
A system related alert that lets me know if it appears the car has gone on a trip without the related data being updated (with a grace period on each end) at least once between the car leaving and coming back
This depends upon the vehicle but I noticed there are diagnostics for MPG I may capture, but also noticed when the car is off but the key is on “ACC” (so people can play the radio etc.) it does transmit data, but with Fuel level = 0 so most sensors I have them ignoring any data for alerting if the RPM = 0. (After I got a phone call telling me the fuel level was 0!)
Looks like I’ve taken this one as far as is useful for me
New WICAN Pro Vehicle Groups Release V1.12, add Auto Discovery functionality
This release introduces the highly anticipated Home Assistant Auto-Discovery feature for WiCAN status and OBD2 data, along with critical stability patches for the WireGuard/Tailscale VPN engine.
Home Assistant Auto-Discovery (Initial Release)
Zero-YAML Setup: The WiCAN now officially supports MQTT Auto-Discovery! Your device status (battery voltage, uptime, network info, restart counts) and all active OBD2 PIDs will now automatically populate in Home Assistant as ready-to-use sensors—no manual configuration required.
It connects directly to the WiCAN Pro’s terminal websocket so if you’re using AutoPID you can just run it (requires rebooting the WiCAN after use for AutoPID to resume working). Adding support for the regular WiCAN should also be possible eventually.
Parts of it might be merged upstream, but very doubtful that all would be. As the upstream author said, there’s too many changes.
Yes, its very difficult to build / reverse engineer vehicle profiles. Especially with the stock SW. With the stock SW, I had to manually edit the json profiles, not fun.
With the fork SW, you never have to edit json files, the GUI allows you to fully edit vehicles profiles, save them, and submit to the vehicle database/ other users to share.
@KevinWombat , thanks for all your hard work. As you can see from my earlier post, I am connecting when I start the car to leave and then when I come back to the home network and have built alerts around fuel levels etc. I thought I’d mention this before but I can’t find it what I would like to do is utilize the SD card that is on the device when I am connected to the home network to collect the missing data from trips. Before I dig possibly adding something to your integration that might help with that I do see there is a terminal option and then also there is a logging option but evidently the logging option is only meant for debugging because his very heavy load on the Wiccan CPU. Because this heavy load for logging it sounds like this is not a feasible idea to leave that on to collect data HA is missing upon reconnect.
How much of a load is this actually on the unit - if not too much it may be feasible? Thoughts?
Bit silly question. I got the module but now how to get the forked firmware on it?
Somewhere i read that first i hav to get the latest stock firmware on the dongle via OTA, but then what to do.
Would nice if somewhere i could find a procedure from getting a module to get it up and running with forked firmware (perhaps i overlooked it)
Been searching here Overview · WiCAN Docs and would expect it here Quick Start · WiCAN Docs but it’s not clear to me if this is the stock firmware procedure or the forked (I think) setup info.
Main question I guess, how to get from stock firmware to forked firmware??
I’m assuming you’ll need to click the firmware releases link in the OP and download the .bin file. Then, in WiCAN, update via OTA using that .bin file. Haven’t done it myself, but will try it out later.
Home Assistant Auto-Discovery (Initial Release)