Currently the AutoPi seems to base its power states on battery voltage. Currently on my vehicle, talking to the canbus keeps the computer awake. IIRC; This means that the Autopi will stay on until the voltage drops low enough or will shut off after a predetermined timer.
It would be nice to have a way to keep the autopi running so that it’s always online, but then have the option to stop talking to the canbus to allow the vehicles computers to shut down properly.
My remote starter is always powered and connected to the same canbus wires but does not prevent the vehicles systems to shutdown when the vehicle is shut off.
The only workaround i can find currently is to have the engine shutdown timer reduced to 5 minutes to prevent excessive battery drain… but this also means that i cant “tinker” with the AutoPi without the engine running because it will shut down.
Adding a Ignition input wire through the GPIO and some programming could allow the device to stay awake when the vehicle is set to run/acc but shutdown when the vehicle is shutoff and still stay awake enough to send commands and communicate with the autopi servers for things like vehicle tracking and remote start functionality.
The device wakes up based on the changes to the battery voltage, so this means that starting the car will make the device wake up - And when the engine is running, it will keep awake, but once the engine stops, it will only stay awake for a configurable amount of time.
To get a better idea about the cycles, you can check out the events page on my.autopi.io. Those events will tell you when the device powers up, and why, and when it goes to sleep, and the reason for going to sleep.
The autopi keeps my canbus awake and thus drains my battery hard.
I’ve stopped using this for a while because of this issue. It’s very frustrating. I even bought a new model to hope I could find reasons to use it but still, keeping my canbus awake. I have my timer set down to 30 seconds to prevent issues but annoying none the less…
