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With how much time many of us spend in our cars, it makes perfect sense to consider them a second home. Yet even if that’s not the case, there are still good reasons to connect a car to one’s smart home solution like Home Assistant, such as to keep track of certain parameters for easy monitoring and reminders. This is what [The Stock Pot] channel recently demonstrated using a widget that connects to the OBD-II port inside the car, as not every car comes with its own app yet.
The used dongle is the ESP32-S3-based WiCAN from Australian company MeatPi. This device runs the open source WiCAN firmware. After plugging the dongle into the OBD-II port of the car, the device powers on and can be configured via Wi-Fi like any other smart device these days. After that it’s just another Wi-Fi device on the network.
Since each car’s ECU will represent data differently, you need a car-specific configuration, which can take some tweaking. The idea of integrating with Home Assistant is directly supported by MeatPi, with a handy documentation page. Of course [The Stock Pot] shared their configuration if you want to feel inspired. Among the parameters monitored you get things like fuel level, days to service and coolant temperature.
