Project Code 4

Unfortunately I’ve slowly undone most of this project and returned the car to stock. I don’t drive much anymore and the project wasn’t in a reliable state. I will likely sell the thing soon.

For your car, you could probably get 90% of the way there with an android head unit, LTE/USB stick, and resler’s ibus interface or bluebus. The only meaningful feature the custom PCB added was controlling the door locks with software.

It was really fun at the time to mess around with, but it’s not something I’d recommend doing. IMO the most reliable piece to come out of the experiment was the gokbus library (I still use it to this day to reset my radio’s mode). The rest of the stack frankly isn’t usable. Let me know if you want any missing source code/files regardless.


BMW Control Center

An embedded computer, an Arduino PCB, and an Android tablet walk into a bar car…

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I am modernizing my 2005 vehicle by adding oodles of connectivity and custom electronics. So far, I’ve successfully implemented:

These primary features culminate into an app controlled, privacy preserving, monolith of a smart-car-computer system.

Stack

It’s all primarily written with:

My design goal is to steal all the ideas modern automakers have fleshed out the past two decades, learning everything I can while writing my own take.

Hardware

Control App

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Infrequently Asked Qs

What makes this specific to BMW?

Great question, me. The KBus is a proprietary complement to the more universal CAN bus, and is unique to BMWs and Minis. Probably Rolls-Royce as well.

The KBus is such a critical component, and the design is specific to my model, it would be less useful on any other vehicle.

Inspiring / Useful Links