A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves
1.2 million grant for this?<p>Now I’ve seen grift, but come on. I want to hire their grant writer.<p>Literally a relay in the starter lead. This looks like one of my afternoon projects, and I’m not even joking. I have a 1990s montero diesel and it leaks power, and I often forget to disconnect the terminal.<p>So I bought a relay from AliExpress (same one shown in this photo but one size up) and hooked it up with an esp32 and some discrete components.<p>It senses my phones Bluetooth radio and  energises the relay if I turn the key on when I’m within a few feet, as well as any other Bluetooth radios I authenticate.<p>I can also just turn on the wipers momentarily and it will latch the relay. If the vehicle is not running, the relay unlatches in 15 minutes.<p>That way I can basically forget that it exists, problem solved. It has been working flawlessly for two years now. The whole thing took me about 3 hours to put on strip board and program, another half hour to enclose and mount it.<p>Give me an hour more in micropython and I could make it require a passcode entered on your phone  with a  secret wiper switch sequence as a backup. If I threw a five dollar Hall effect current sensor (as shown in their project) it could require a whole dog and pony show of switch activations to unlock it.  Adjusting it to different vehicles would be a one- time calibration sequence like I use for my water flow meters.<p>I guess I should have applied for a grant.