CarWatch - Your car as a chat-room agent
Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI
CarWatch turns your car into a fully offline chat-room agent using a Raspberry Pi 5 and a local 35B-parameter AI model. It joins your GroupMind rooms, answers questions from your car's owner's manual with page citations, and provides hands-free voice interaction. It monitors engine data via OBD, pulls dashcam clips, and offers a phone dashboard for remote control. With self-updates and a dial-out tunnel, it stays reachable anywhere. Built for privacy, it operates without cloud or subscription, making your car a smart, connected companion.
Local is the product; online is the enrichment. The car must be fully useful with zero connectivity, because cars live in garages, tunnels and countryside dead zones.
- ehnto
Fair warning, I have found local models and frontier models to be very bad at the specifics when it comes to cars.
Small differences like month and year model can impact oil capacity, oil weight and things like that, the details that matter quite a bit.
I found frontier models couldn't get things like what engine was in a 1994 Nissan Skyline, one of the more infamous and talked about cars on internet forums for decades, with dedicated fan databases that would have been scraped.
Questions like "what air filter do I need for my 1994 Suzuki Swift?" are hit and miss.
- nacs
What's the point in having it use an offline LLM if it still requires an internet connection to send all your chat messages through the "Groupmind" paid service?
Seems like the real purpose of this project was to plug Groupmind and whatever else the author made.
- rpcope1
> stuff like changing AC
Maybe it's different in the People's Republic of Europe or wherever, but either that's a translation error or I don't understand, but I would be interested to see how quickly the EPA gets mad when Claude tells you to recover your R134a to the atmosphere.
- walrus01
It's unfortunate that a 16GB raspberry pi is so incredibly expensive now. Fascinating how we've scope creeped over the years from the original $30 or $35 raspberry pi SBC to this.
- Robdel12
I will shamelessly plug https://pitstop.app. I've been working on this for years and I work on/race cars regularly.
I wouldn't fully trust LLMs with this :p BUT this project is still really freaking sweet.