Remote start is a great thing, especially in the dead of winter. But what if you didn’t need to find your keys or smartphone to fire up your chariot? YouTuber jryanishere claims to have rigged up his Amazon Echo speaker to turn on his car via an OBD reader. It’s pretty cool stuff.
A mad YouTube scientist seems to have solved your “I Want My Car To Be Warm But I Can’t Find My Keys Or Phone” issue. He claims to have built a system that uses an Amazon Echo speaker to start his car from his house via a simple voice command and some coding wizardry.
I’m no computer scientist, so I can’t tell you this is 100 percent legit, but it seems to make sense to me. Basically, the Amazon Echo receives a command, in this case “Alexa, turn on my car” from the user.
That command is sent from the Echo via probably wifi to a a plug-in on the user’s laptop (or on another server) called SmartThings. SmartThings is a software used to control IOT, or Internet of Things, devices (like smart appliances).
The YouTuber seems to have used SmartThings to build a device handler which he calls a virtual switch, and that makes heads or tails of the input from the Echo. It then sends the appropriate message to a Rasberry Pi (basically a fully functional Linux computer.) The Raspberry Pi then sends a bluetooth signal to an OBD reader, which fires up the car.
Voila! A your car is warming itself up as you click the snooze button a million times in your cozy bed.
It’s a pretty cool setup, if a little clunky and not very secure. Anyone out there willing to try this? Let us know how it goes.