OpenAiways

Community notes and findings for keeping the Aiways U5 alive and connected after the manufacturer went bankrupt and shut down its cloud servers.

The infotainment head unit is made by Adayo / 华阳 (vendor code haoke/hk). The goal of this project is to self-host the “connected car” features the dead OEM cloud used to provide — remote climate, telemetry, a custom cluster display, real navigation and speed-limit warnings — with no cloud and no OEM dependency.

⚠ Own vehicle only. Writing to a vehicle CAN bus and overriding cluster displays has real safety implications — understand each step before doing it.

• Project vision & architecture — the plan, the always-on constraint, two-tier hardware
• Head unit hardware & OS — i.MX6, Android 4.4.2, what is inside
• Getting in (root / ADB) — wireless root access, updating apps in place
• Full device backup — partition layout and imaging method
• Connectivity: modem vs TBox — where the SIM lives, the secure gateway
• CAN bus access — the MCU route vs the OBD2 port
• Vehicle control (HVAC, SoC…) — what we can read and command
• The displays & cluster override — painting on the driver panel
• Telemetry to Home Assistant — live car data over MQTT
• Navigation & EV routing — HERE APIs, speed limits, charge planning
• Speed-warning app & map-matcher — our own map matching
• Open threads & next steps

Proven: root ADB, full device backup, CAN read/write via the head unit (SoC read, A/C control), cluster-display override + speed-limit sign, MQTT telemetry to Home Assistant, HERE navigation / EV routing, and an offline map-matcher for speed limits.

Still open: the “wake the HV system while parked” CAN sequence (needed for remote preconditioning and for topping up the 12 V battery), the always-on cellular Tier-1 hardware, and on-car navigation integration. See roadmap.

The source code for the apps and tools will be published separately in a Git repository. These pages document the findings — what the hardware is, how it works, and what we learned.