A passion project by a couple of auto enthusiasts to bring the latest tech features to those old gas guzzling revving set of wheels laying around in your garage.
In the mini, we are enabling cloud connectivity in legacy vehicles. The setup consists of a small DIY device that connects to your car's OBD port, pairs via our mobile app and gives you real-time connectivity with the vehicle! We are happy to announce that this system is ready as of v0.1 🎉. It has the following feeatures currently working:
- Live vehicle monitoring
- Dashboard cluster mirroring
- Location tracking
- Vehicle health analysis
- Driving stats (daily, periodic)
- Health estimation
As for the pro, we are still building out the prototype. You can view the source code to track the progress.
Get a quick glimpse of the mini here ⬇️
Note The phone is on mobile data so this is the same as if you were viewing it from anywhere else in the world. For a more convincing demo, see the video on YouTube.
alpaDrive.mp4
If you're enthusiastic enough, you can use alpaDrive. You don't require much technical knowledge or be a pro to setup this system for your car. Just read on to know how you can get alpaDrive for your car.
- You should have a basic familiarity with using the command line. Programming knowledge is not required.
- You should be willing to spend some money 💸 for the components. 😁
- A car, obviously
- An Android phone
- Some patience, because this is still an early stage project. You might run into issues.
- Build a device as per the instructions detailed here.
- Download the APK for our app from the releases page.
- Pair the app & device
- Leave the device in your car! You have connected it to the cloud.
If you run into any issues, feel free to start a discussion here and we'll respond! We'll help you solve the issue. We look forward to welcoming you into the alpaDrive community!
This system consists of 3 main components. The software for all of these are open sourced and available in this GitHub organization:
- A central server, written in Rust🦀, that acts as an auth & messaging platform for the vehicle and app. It also manages data storage using a Mongo database, and generates health reports for the vehicle. Find the code here.
- The software in vehicle, running on the Pi. It manages the hardware and communicates with the car and server. You need to have the hardware set up before being able to use the software. Find the code here.
- The mobile app, built using the Expo workflow and React Native. It just acts as an interface for the user to view all the data in an intuitive manner. Find the code here.
We don't plan on releasing this as an end product as of now. However, we do intend on improving the system for DIY enthusiast users. As such, any valid contributions are welcome! We look forward to seeing your issues and PR's in our repositories.
