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Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

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31–40 of 79 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

#31

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.

FWIW you can still buy a B+ for like $30. They just aren’t that useful.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1914?src=raspberrypi

Re: Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

#33
post #31

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.

FWIW you can still buy a B+ for like $30. They just aren’t that useful. https://www.adafruit.com/product/1914?src=raspberrypi

You 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...

Re: Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

#34
post #14

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 decad…

Just a few hours ago I gave ChatGPT my window sticker and the installation manual for a new suspension setup. I asked for new hardware that would typically be replaced during this install, like torque-to-yield bolts and fasteners. I also asked for new oil filters. I got a comprehensive grid of the exact part numbers needed in a nice dense table. sol 5.6 high is my daily driver.

> sol 5.6 high is my daily driver.

Mine, too.

Did you fact-check the output?

I've found the bot to be particularly bad at stuff like producing accurate lists of parts to replace during automotive projects.

Re: Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

#35
post #7

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

#36
post #32

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.

Isn'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-...

Re: Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

#37
> 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.

Re: Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

#38
post #37

> 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.

I assume it means changing the settings like fan speed or target temperature.

Re: Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

#40
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be trained(? or referencing) on the specific cars' owner's manual.

Yeah 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.

The 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

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