yaris-obd 🚗📡
A Raspberry Pi 3-based OBD-II + GPS tracker for my 2013 Toyota Yaris — reads live vehicle data over USB, tracks position with a SIM868 GNSS/GSM HAT, and serves it all from a local web UI you can pull up on your phone by connecting to the car's own WiFi hotspot. Fully usable offline: no internet needed in the car, offline map tiles included. Also handles pulling dashcam footage off a USB dashcam for local/remote backup.
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rené lévesque bangers i have a dream |
Screenshot
Features
- 📊 Live OBD-II data (speed, RPM, DTC codes) over a cheap USB ELM327-compatible adapter
- 🛰️ Real GPS tracking via a Waveshare SIM868 GNSS/GSM/Bluetooth HAT, plotted live on an offline Leaflet map (pre-cached map tiles — no internet needed in the car)
- 📶 Self-hosted WiFi hotspot so you can load the web UI on your phone from inside the car,
with automatic fallback to your home WiFi when in range (
http://yaris.local— no port number) - 🎥 Dashcam file retrieval — detects a USB dashcam automatically (any brand/folder layout, no hardcoded device path), copies its footage locally, verified against real hardware
- ☁️ Remote upload — a self-hosted server (Flask + Postgres,
server/) receives trip/GPS logs and dashcam footage over the internet (via Cloudflare Tunnel or a plain port-forward). Dashcam videos upload in resumable 40MB chunks (works around tunnel body-size limits and keeps the Pi's memory footprint flat regardless of file size); a UI toggle can pause dashcam uploads independently while trip logs keep syncing - 🗄️ Local SQLite trip logging, retried/synced to the remote server with automatic backoff
- 🔌 Runs fully headless as a
systemdservice, autostarting on boot
Hardware
| Part | Notes |
|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 3 Model B | Web UI host + hotspot |
| Waveshare SIM868 HAT | GNSS (GPS) + GSM/GPRS, unused Bluetooth |
| USB OBD-II adapter | PL2303-based, ELM327-compatible (originally Bluetooth, switched to USB) |
| USB dashcam | Any brand — detected as generic USB mass storage |
| 2013 Toyota Yaris | The patient |
See PLAN.md for full hardware bring-up notes (SIM868 jumper/UART setup, antenna gotchas, etc.) and the detailed project history.
Getting started
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 app.py
The app serves on http://<host>:5000. On the Pi it also runs as a systemd service
(see deploy/) and is reachable with no port number at http://yaris.local once the
mDNS + port-redirect setup described in PLAN.md is installed.
For the remote server (receives trip logs + dashcam uploads), see server/README.md.
Project status
This project was revived after a couple of years on the shelf. The first 11 planned phases are done and the full pipeline — OBD/GPS logging, offline web UI, WiFi hotspot, dashcam retrieval, and remote upload — has been verified against real hardware end-to-end, including a full real dashcam import and upload run. A phone-relay upload feature was built and tested but ultimately removed: real-world testing showed it hit a fundamental phone-OS limitation (a browser page can't use WiFi and cellular simultaneously), so it couldn't actually deliver on its "upload from the road without the Pi's slow WiFi" goal — see PLAN.md for the full writeup. That capability is now planned as a native Android app (further down the roadmap) instead. Only the SIM868 cellular fallback (for uploading while out of WiFi range) remains untested (no SIM card available yet). Full phase-by-phase history and the current roadmap (dashcam/video file browsers, OBD hardening, power-loss resilience, trip history, alerts, and more) are in PLAN.md.