Remoter Starter Diagrams

Today Matt and I worked on our remote car starter project. We are building a remote car starter using Arduino, an electronic prototyping platform. This is a completely original project, we are not starting with any set of plans or instructions. It is all custom built. The remote starter is going to address the challenge of most reasonably priced remote car starters…that being how to I start the car when I upwards of a 1/4 mile plus away? Or more importantly while I am comfortably sitting at my desk at work or in the lab. We are building our remote starter using a cell phone as the communication device between us and the vehicle. Our short term goal is to be able to start/stop the car by telephone. Long term the platform will be able to handle more complex operations such as texting, responding to queries for information, and preprogrammed operations like running for a set duration.

Today we focused on documenting the necessary logic to safely start the vehicle and gathering information on how we are going to interface with the car. Seeing as these are cars made by GM they do not exactly have an api we can interface with. No the “interface” we will be using is good old analogy signals via copper wire controlled by a digital logic via the Arduino. So once we documented the control logic we worked on identifying our copper interace elements. Thankfully most car’s electrical diagrams can be found online.

Our next steps are to start building our car “API”…in layman’s terms we are going to start soldering wires in that we can wire up to relays that will connect to a DB-9 connecter to interface with Arduino.