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Show 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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1mo agoWhat's the hardware situation to get OBD data?
- Alive-in-2025 1mo agoYou get a bluetooth device that plugs into the odb port, or a patch cord that you connect to your raspberry pi. There are fancier ones with more features, that can do more than just report signals like watch for certain signals or changes. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=obd+bluetooth+adapter https://www.amazon.com/s?k=obd+bluetooth+adapter
- petruspennanen 1mo agoAny standard OBD-II ELM32 will work, they are like $15.. Mine is a Vgate iCar Pro over bluetooth. A USB ELM327 v1.5 also works
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- dofm 1mo agoCool — 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?
- 0xbadcafebee 1mo agoQwen 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 matter
- dofm 1mo agoThe issue is not RAM size. It's memory bandwidth! The 12B and 31B models will be useless on a Pi 5; maybe the 12B can be persuaded to run, but it may not manage more than one token per second. It only manages 17GB/s memory bandwidth (I have seen a suggestion that the 4GB model manages more). But yes — some sort of small reasoning-oriented model (Ornith?) seems a better candidate than Qwen 35B. (Don't get me wrong, I think the 35B model is ace… just seems like at least an unusual choice here)
- petruspennanen 1mo agoHmm could try Ornith - wouldn't mind if answers came a bit faster. Probably hard to reach Qwens intelligence level though.
- aamargulies 1mo agoQwen3.5-4B 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.
- petruspennanen 1mo agoIt 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!
- Reubachi 1mo agoI'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
- VTimofeenko 1mo agoFrom 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
- petruspennanen 1mo agoI've had many drives with the carwatch and the list of verified features is long. Today we tested manufacturer cloud integration for lots of data and e g door locking through it. V0.3 came out today, progress is rapid.
- rpcope1 1mo agoI 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.
- tessierashpool 1mo agoI 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.
- almogo 1mo agoCriminally claude-authored. All the typical watermarked shit. Getting real tired of this.
- thoughtbefore 1mo agoIs code more like poetry, or more like a recipe?
- petruspennanen 1mo ago[dead]
- petruspennanen 1mo agoBTW the Mermaid diagram renders now :) and CarWatch talks well.
- hypfer 1mo agoWhat 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?
- art222 1mo ago[flagged]
- voidUpdate 1mo agoPeople don't want to ask google, they just want to ask their plagiarism machine instead and be fed some answers directly, correctness be damned
- anshorei 1mo agoIf I ask google, it will just use the google plagiarism machine to serve me a response anyway, might as well ask the plagiarism machine of my choice.
- voidUpdate 1mo agoSo you ignore the google plagiarism machine and scroll down to find actual results
- ygouzerh 1mo agoYou 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
- SmallUseful 1mo ago[dead]
- ehnto 1mo agoFair 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.
- javier123454321 1mo agoThis seems to be trained(? or referencing) on the specific cars' owner's manual.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- efskap 1mo agoYeah referencing is the way to go, as even finetuning probably captures style more than concrete facts. I know with large context windows we don't really RAG anymore, but for owner's manual lookup with a smaller model it seems ideal. Something every LLM user ends up learning is that they're far better used as search and summarization tools than as knowledge databases in themselves.
- HPsquared 1mo agoThe hard part is finding the correct owners manual. Also in many cases the owners manual is generic and covers many options and trim levels. Edit: this applies to service manuals too
- Kim_Bruning 1mo agoA model's internal knowledge is great! It's useful as initial priors to speed up the REAL search.
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- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- shahariaa 1mo ago[dead]
- Robdel12 1mo agoI will shamelessly plug https://pitstop.app 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.
- apinstein 1mo agoVery cool! Working on a product for in-care use as well, complementary to this. Would love to talk shop!
- Robdel12 1mo agoYes, I'd love to! How? haha I'm robdel12 on pretty much everything (twitter, github, threads). Personal site w/email link https://robertdelu.ca/ https://robertdelu.ca/ I'd rather not put my email out here :p Any/all work!
- ellis0n 1mo agoAwesome!
- petruspennanen 1mo agoThanks! :) Release 0.3 out today!
- jiangriver66 1mo agoI’d be most interested in how it handles uncertainty when the answer depends on trim/year or service history. For a car assistant, a useful default might be “I found the relevant manual section, but this is ambiguous” rather than a direct fix. Do you surface the source page or confidence anywhere?
- petruspennanen 1mo ago[flagged]
- petruspennanen 1mo agoIt refers to the manual page, that's really all you can do in that case especially offline.
- walrus01 1mo agoIt'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.
- blululu 1mo agoFWIW you can still buy a B+ for like $30. They just aren’t that useful. https://www.adafruit.com/product/1914?src=raspberrypi https://www.adafruit.com/product/1914?src=raspberrypi
- walrus01 1mo agoYou can buy a pi 4 1GB for $49 CAD which is pretty close to the original price, especially accounting for USD:CAD conversion and inflation in the last 12 years. That's a much more normal price for something with all the I/O pins of a raspberry pi. I would never in my life even think of trying to run a LLM of that size on one (spending $300+ on the board just to do so), it's really just a weird use...
- dowonseo 1mo agoIf the agent could read info like the manual and had a memory system logging vehicle operation data, this seems like it would get pretty useful over time
- petruspennanen 1mo agoYes exactly! It has the manual and uses RAG on it.
- nacs 1mo agoWhat'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.
- tzs 1mo agoIsn't that covered in the second paragraph of the post, and in this section [1] of the README at the linked site? [1] https://github.com/ThinkOffApp/CarWatch#local-vs-online-the-strategy https://github.com/ThinkOffApp/CarWatch#local-vs-online-the-...
- petruspennanen 1mo agoYou 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!
- rpcope1 1mo ago> 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.
- meatmanek 1mo agoI assume it means changing the settings like fan speed or target temperature.
- petruspennanen 1mo agoGreetings 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
- bitwize 1mo agoNow make it talk in a Fuchikoma voice.
- petruspennanen 1mo agoOk. Coming up in v0.4!
- wahid_seddiqi 1mo ago[flagged]
- yeasin-arafat 1mo ago[flagged]
- fedeb95 1mo agoI 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.
- petruspennanen 1mo agoThanks point taken, will add clear use cases with proven / in testing / planned status indicators!
- amelius 1mo ago> and refuses to answer what the manual doesn't say. Prove it.
- sshussain270 1mo agoAt 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.
- ygouzerh 1mo agoI 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'
- petruspennanen 1mo agoExactly 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.
- petruspennanen 1mo agoJust launched v0.4! Listens to spoken questions, reads sensor data, thinks hard and gives sharp as nail answers - completely offline. Video from today: https://x.com/petruspennanen/status/2093404279000141869 https://x.com/petruspennanen/status/2093404279000141869