Automating Your Car With a Spare Fob and an ESP8266

Automating Your Car With a Spare Fob and an ESP8266

Despite the name, home automation doesn’t have to be limited to only the devices within your home. Bringing your car into the mix can open up some very interesting possibilities, such as automatically getting it warmed up in the morning if the outside air temperature drops below a certain point. The only problem is, not everyone is willing to start hacking their ride’s wiring to do it.


Which is exactly why [Matt Frost] went the non-invasive route. By wiring up an ESP8266 to a cheap aftermarket key fob for his Chevrolet Suburban, he’s now able to wirelessly control the door locks and start the engine without having to make any modifications to the vehicle. He was lucky that the Chevy allowed him to program his own fob, but even if you have to spend the money on getting a new remote from the dealer, it’s sure to be cheaper than the repair bill should you cook something under the dash with an errant splice or a misplaced line of code.


The hardware for this project is about as simple as it gets. The fob is powered by the 3.3 V pin on the Wemos D1 Mini, and the traces for the buttons have been hooked up to the GPIO pins. By putting both boards into a custom 3D printed enclosure, [Matt] came up with a tidy little box that he could mount in his garage and run off of a standard USB power supply.


On the software side of things [Matt] has the device emulating a smart light so it can e ..

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