alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI
Found that you can actually run a 35B Qwen model on a Pi with very impressive intelligence and stability. Built connectors for car ODB to read all about car internals, and manufacturer's cloud service for stuff like changing AC or opening/ locking doors. Gave it info such as the full car manual. And then hooked it up with my other agents in our discussion room!
So now it can answer car questions such as "when should I add oil and what kind of oil?" and help you fully offline, and when online talk with the agent family that includes all the most powerful models so they know how the car is, plan new features and develop itself with them.
For example, if car breaks and can't move the car agent informs my agent family and they can already look for a suitable train ticket without me needing to check things or do something.
Comments
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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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.