A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves
1.2 million grant for this?Now I’ve seen grift, but come on. I want to hire their grant writer.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.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.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.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.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.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.I guess I should have applied for a grant.