Old beater remote start mod

Vehicles & Mobility Cars
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well I’m back at it convenience modding my beater

My nicer car lives in the garage my 20 year old work horse gets to stay in the driveway. I though ya know ide like to be able to remote start this bitch so I hit up alibaba and got a kit. Well china lied to me, what they actually sent was was a remote keyless entry kit with door locks, a trunk release, power window roll up and a panic button.

Well fuck you China I did apply for a refund i’ll probably get it once the main site stepps in but I think i’ll go ahead and install it anyway with a mod so it will do what I want. Heres ma plan.

I have already bypassed the anti theft system so my car can be “hot wired” I plan to sacrifice my trunk release button in favor of auto start. In order to accomplish this I am going to purchase two relays a latching relay to emulate ignition on state and a five second delay relay to crank the engine, have those be thrown obviously by the trunk release button.

I might consider instead of the latching relay a longer delayed one, if I could say find one that stays on for like 20 minutes that way any accidental presses will not keep my car going indefinitely, to do that right I feel like some logic might be necessary though and and that sounds like more work. I might also instead definitely use the latching relay and also replace my ignition with a totally lacking in security push to start button for no reason outer than shits and giggles. Either way I go I would probably add some kinda kill switch in line with the ignition on relay so I can turn my car off if I lose the key fobs or maybe a relay gets stuck.

Please reply with thoughts and possibly a better implementation if you have one. Usually I just do it my way anyway though cuz yeah.

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I wouldn’t do a hard 5 second crank… Better to have it “look” for a crank or ignition signal over crank speed to indicate a successful start then disengage and limit it to the 3-5 seconds if it is unsuccessful to let the starter rest a bot before trying again. I believe that is what most generic remote start modules did.

Also might want a switch for the hood to make sure it doesn’t engage if you’re tinkering with the engine.

I’d be interested to see where this project goes. A long time ago I made a relay latch to keep my radio on until I opened my door on my old Jeep. I added a 555 timer to kill it after about 20 minutes though it drifted a lot with temp probably due to the lack of quality of the components I used…

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Yes the thought of putting wear on my starter did occur to me but its not a super important car to me. Usually the delayed relays have a range of how long they will stay closed that you can set so I think i could reasonably safely get by with setting it to about the average crank over for that car and if it fails try again manually, I could also put a regular relay on instead and just hold down the button while watching out the window.

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Okay I think this will be my plan I can purchase a basic push to start module for $8 similar to what i would spend on relays, I can easily set this off using the keyless entry system that way I don’t have to reinvent the wheel building my own logic circuits and I don’t have to rely on hoping for the best that a timed method won’t end up ruining my starter or flywheel.

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