Keyless Entry System

Basic Idea: 

Ditch the key FOB and use your mobile phone as a passive key to access and authorize your car. There are many challenges with such a system but I believe this development is unavoidable. Whilst my prototype is certainly not the most elegant, it does proof a basic point, which is that dedicated physical car keys are a thing of the past. I hope that in the future car manufactures will implement such systems, but given that currently key FOBs can be sold for $200 a pop, killing this cash cow might take a while.

Demo of the Bluetooth Passive Keyless Entry System:

Tech Stuff:

Signal Strength - Distance Approximation

To my knowledge there is currently no way to rapidly poll the signal strength (RSSI) in the standard Anroid API. The RN42 chipset on the bluesmirf has a way of outputting RSSI values at 5HZ but coding and analysis gets quite a bit more complicated since one needs to enter the command mode of them modem which would prevent the actual devices from communicating. There is a passthrough command but trial and error showed that this method was not very reliable. 

The solution was to come up with a method of somewhat guesstimating the distance between the modem and phone. In simple terms this was done by sending data from the phone to the modem and measuring how many packets were lost in a given period of time. This is not ideal, but works surprisingly well. 

Future bluetooth modems might have better and easier ways of polling signal strength which then can be used to assess the distance more easily but for now we wanna stick to cheap off the shelf hardware, requiring no modifications.

The Bluesmirf Connected to the Arduino Board

 Slave/Master - Connection Initiation:

Your phone needs all the battery it has and can not waste precious power trying to continuously initiate a connection to the vehicle. It is thus imperative that the connection must be initiated by the bluesmirf, which has all the power it could ever need from the vehicles battery.

This is the documentation of the RN42 chipset including the command set. The basic things you will need to do:

1. Enter Command Mode
2. Set desired baud rate (I choose 9600kbps)
3. Authorize the MAC address of your phone
4. Set the Board to Master and Auto Connect Mode
5. Adjust scanning and paging intervals to your liking (although the bluesmirf has somewhat limited capabilities in that the "The inquiry and page interval is fixed at 0x1000 = 2.56 seconds"

Powering the Bluesmirf:

The bluesmirf, according to Sparkfun, uses about 25mA. This figure showed to be an average guestimate after the actual power consumption was measured. Turns out that it spiked up to 42mA,more than the poor little Arduino can supply via a single Digital Input/Output pin. If there are people who actually used a single I/O pin could have damaged their boards...
Forum Topic Here

The solution was to simply use Two I/O pins. This way the bluesmirf could conveniently be switched on and off. During actual driving driving bluetooth communication is disabled to conserve power and board life but most importantly to let the phone goto sleep.

Hardware used:

Galaxy S3 (Android 4.1)
SainSmart 2-Channel 5V Relay Module for Arduino DSP AVR PIC ARM

Bluetooth Modem - BlueSMiRF Silver

Code Coming Shortly...