overview
Table of Contents
Project vision & architecture
Rebuild the “connected car” that the dead OEM cloud + TBox used to provide, self-hosted:
- Remote preconditioning — heat/cool the cabin before you get in (the headline feature).
- Remote telemetry — SoC, range, charge state, doors/locks — to your own app / Home Assistant.
- Better in-car UX — real turn-by-turn navigation and real speed-limit warnings on the
driver cluster; climate controllable in parallel with normal head-unit use.
- Give the head unit internet again (the OEM data SIM is dead).
The always-on constraint
Remote preconditioning means a “start climate now” command must reach the car any time it is parked and off. So something with a cellular link has to stay reachable 24/7 — a permanent power draw that is a requirement, not something to design away.
Powering always-on without killing the battery
- The 12 V battery is small (days of parasitic draw) and must never be deep-discharged — the
car needs it to wake and close its HV contactors.
- The HV traction pack is huge (~63 kWh). So treat the 12 V as a buffer and the HV pack as the real energy source: monitor 12 V, and when it sags, wake the HV system so the DC-DC converter recharges the 12 V. This sustains an always-on load essentially indefinitely,
bounded by an HV state-of-charge floor. (This is how the OEM TBox survives long parking.)
- Key synergy: the reverse-engineered “wake HV” primitive is the same for
preconditioning and for 12 V recharge — one result enables both.
Two-tier hardware architecture
- Tier 1 — always-on low-power node (e.g. ESP32/STM32 + LTE-M/NB-IoT modem, on the CAN
bus, with a wake-capable transceiver). The TBox replacement: permanently reachable at
single-digit mA, measures 12 V directly, monitors pack SoC over CAN, wakes the HV for
preconditioning or a 12 V top-up, and wakes Tier 2 on demand.
* **Tier 2 — heavy peripherals, powered/woken only when needed:**
* A **companion Android tablet** (own SIM + internet): computes navigation, acts as a Wi-Fi
hotspot to give the head unit internet, and issues climate commands.
* The **head unit** (these notes): executes climate/AC commands and renders turn-by-turn +
speed-limit warnings on the cluster panel.
Safety floors
- 12 V low-voltage cutoff — stop the load / alert before stranding the car's wake logic.
- HV-SoC floor — stop recharging so the traction pack is never flattened.
overview.txt · Last modified: by 127.0.0.1
