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- Hacker News
- What is the LLM doing there?
Why does it need to be hooked up to the car for you to ask it which type of engine oil the manual recommends?
What is the point?
by hypfer - People don't want to ask google, they just want to ask their plagiarism machine instead and be fed some answers directly, correctness be damnedby voidUpdate
- You could hook it up with different tools, like real time information:
Oil + GPS + Web Search --> "LLM > You have 50 Km of autonomy. You can go today to this cheaper oil station, at 20 km, on your GPS road, instead of the one near your home. The one at 10Km is closed as well due to a local strike, I will avoid it too"
You can of course script all the scenarios + only use a TTS model. However, when plugging different systems together, I feel that it's the sweet spot where LLM is shining --> no need to pre-plan every scenarios that the user will ask, it can be done on the fly
by ygouzerh - > 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.
by rpcope1 - I assume it means changing the settings like fan speed or target temperature.by meatmanek
- Greetings from the republic.. yeah I part time live in Berlin where we had 41'C (that is like 106 F ?) end of June, and have been watching them reconsider their attitude to AC.
Anyway here I meant activating heating / cooling before you step in the car, as determined by your agent family who understand you well and not requiring any "AC on!" commands from you. i live in Finland and preheating is very useful in the winter
- Just launched v0.4! Listens to spoken questions, reads sensor data, thinks hard and gives sharp as nail answers - completely offline.
Video from today:
- At one point, every machine on earth is going to be its own agent, asking and answering questions and expressing concerns. Its like a good example of that, but I think the utility of it needs to be clear, by making some action a lot more convenient or even better, by solving a structural impossibility - what is it that you can do with an agent mounted in a car that you otherwise can't? That seems like a much stronger use case to me.by sshussain270
- I feel that it could be a nice addition for:
- People that didn't read the manual (actually almost all of us), like: explain a warning signal
- Or integrate different systems together: `I saw that on your GPS you want to go to this place, but in 2 hours it will be snowing heavily there. Please remember to bring your snow chains'
by ygouzerh - Exactly right! Yes now adding use cases where you actually need an agent in the car. Proactively informing the agent team about car status and them performing follow up actions based on my schedule and preferences too is one basic set up where an agent is needed.
- 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.
by Robdel12 - Very cool! Working on a product for in-care use as well, complementary to this. Would love to talk shop!by apinstein
- Cool — but is that model really the right choice for the task?
I guess it is only 3B active which helps a lot but is Gemma 4 E4B not more practical?
by dofm - It was chosen because it presents a new level of intelligence in this size class. The smaller gemmas abd qwens are not so smart.
It was a very tight fit!
- Qwen 4B and 9B should be faster and better reasoning than Gemma 4 E4B. Other good options for that much RAM are Gemma 4 12b and 31b. Gemma 4 E4B would be better for native audio, but OP is using Whisper for STT so prob doesn't matterby 0xbadcafebee
- Qwen3.5-4B would be a good (better?) candidate. It uses a gated, deltanet hybrid, so your KV cache stays nearly flat as context grows, important for RAM-constrained environments like the Pi.by aamargulies
- I think you should provide better use case scenarios that make clear why this project is useful.
I can already change AC and lock doors with two buttons, why it should be better to do it by voice? Pressing those buttons is way faster.
I guess the manual RAG is useful, what I am saying is that use cases aren't clear from your post or README. As it is, one reads it as "cool, LLM in a car", and skips it.
by fedeb95 - Thanks point taken, will add clear use cases with proven / in testing / planned status indicators!
- 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.by walrus01
- FWIW you can still buy a B+ for like $30. They just aren’t that useful.by blululu
- I'm currently integrating one for simple diagnostic readouts to integrated small touchscreen. The main goal being a retro looking display that mainly dumps ODB data/monitors, but also reads maps data to show a "waypointer" a la crazy taxi. (This is proving difficult)
Respectfully, I don't think this is....real?
-I mean, getting the absolute basic bits like diag codes converted from the odb 2 data to some program w/ a graphic interface is about as far as people get, if they can get passed the power and power on/off conundrums.
-If you get that far, How in the lord's name did you manage to seemingly....MITM the vehicles cloud service (climate/locks/remote start) using raspian or whatever? IE; how are you able to establish a TLS connection (yeah, like that lingo?) from the raspberry to the manufacturer API? I think the manufacturer would be interested, as you have functionaley made another key to the car.
-A more important question....what purpose does this serve? IE; the cloud connection/controller is in the car. I can't imagine it's easier to connect to the rasp shell (is it on 24/7?) to connect to the car app to turn on the ac.
- I assume you have one of the "big boy" ones with more WAM. THat said.....are you implying by saying "the pie can actually run qwen" that you are running it locally? if so.....erm...I need reciepts. Cuz idk what that even means nowadays.
Maybe i'm just jaded because my "crazy, crazy taxi style waymarker + ODB2" monitor isn't progressing, but this is...fishy
by Reubachi - Yes Qwen runs local. Manufacturer cloud workw via existing integrations (they have many) in Home Assistant. The Pi makes a secure tunnel to my home assistant running on a Mac mini at home, and then reads data and gives commands like the manufacturer's mobile app does.
It's all in the repo and this feature has been proven on several test drives, feel free to check it out. What would be great if you can add your cars cloud to your HA and use it with CarWatch, so we could have expand device coverage. I have only 2 cars and they are both MB - the nice thing is you can view both cars on CarWatch, one just does not have OBD port on :)
- I have no idea on OP, but as far as a waypointer, have been in the area of building bespoke automotive telemetry solutions for a while now (including reversing some existing tools), I would wager that something like the Freematics One+ could do it easily if you combine the IMU with the GPS data (I've managed to get good data for something similar this way). The Freematics dongle does suck in comparison to even the now gone STN2120 as it artificially bottlenecks PID data retrieval on the CAN by the boneheaded design of the STM32 coprocessor firmware, but it probably would work well for your use case.
EDIT: I've actually got a couple cars with the One+ B, doing that sort analysis/data capture, so speaking from actual experience here.
by rpcope1 - From readme:
"""
Unverified against the real car — it will confirm or refute itself on the next drive
"""
Looks like a ton of this is aspirational.
For your project -- do you really need the car's GPS positioning? Could go with a dedicated GPS antenna, like the freematics dongle
by VTimofeenko - I scanned this README looking for the part written by a human and gave up when I realized there wasn't one.
the Mermaid diagram doesn't even render.
- Is code more like poetry, or more like a recipe?
- Criminally claude-authored. All the typical watermarked shit. Getting real tired of this.by almogo
- BTW the Mermaid diagram renders now :) and CarWatch talks well.
- 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.
by nacs - You can chat with it offline, it serves a dashboard and a chat interface. Carwatch is all open source and free.
Groupmind.one is a free service where you can have a private room or many to work with your multiagent team. I made an app for Play Store called CodeWatch which gets you in your room with native smartwatch and android apps, so you can do all your dev work from the watch by speaking, tapping approve and also merging GitHub PRs. Actually I didn't put a price on that either - it's approved and online but I have a better version whose review process still on. Anyway the watch and eink apps are pretty cool and ofc I use them constantly myself so could charge like $3 per month at some point.
But you can make your own discussion rooms too, I made an IDE agent kit on GH that let's your agent talk via many routes, like locally stored files.
But yeah obviously I'm plugging my stuff as I'm so excited by it. I never thought a soapbox sized raspberry could sound like an intelligent and reasonable... car. I see a future that everyone's agents create together with humans. Make one yourself,customize to your style and let's get them talking. amazing time we are living!