Shortcuts for car

iOS
1

I just bought a BMW i3 and wanted to check and see if anyone here knew of ways to create shortcuts for electric vehicles? The BMW Connected app is kinda lame. What I hope for is as part of my morning routine with shortcuts, to be able to climatize the car after checking the weather. Also to be able to check battery level, charging status, locked status, range etc with a HomePod.

Maybe these are only possible if the app added these functions, I’m not sure if there is any other way to get this data out of the car and into shortcuts.

Thanks!!

2

For Shortcuts to utilise it, it would need to query the app for data or an online service. If the car/app support neither then you would be out of luck.

3

I did this for my Renault Zoe. I went the route of connecting to the API using Pythonista and triggering that via Shortcuts from my iPad or iPhone. That probably doesn’t work on a HomePod though.

I wrote a little blog post about it. You might be able to adopt that for the BMW i3 API.

1 Like
4

Thanks sylumer and nighthawk for the replies! I’ll dig in to the blog post and see if I can get any form of progress. I had no idea there was an API for the i3 so that’s a big step in the right direction!

5

Hi everyone, I thought I’d update this thread with progress info. With the help of a friend who expertly manages his home and vehicles using Home Assistant, I have managed to get a number of my BMW i3’s sensors and states into Home app and therefore Shortcuts!

I’ll provide links below but the steps were ultimately as follows:

  • Install Python
  • Create and activate the virtual environment
  • Install Home Assistant
  • Add bmw_connected integration to the configuration.yaml file (BMWConnected account required)
  • Add homekit: integration to the configuration.yaml file
  • Run Home Assistant
  • Using pin code from HomeKit notification in Home Assistant, add Home Assistant as a hub in iOS Home app

Most of this was way above my head. I’m still learning about getting some more data from the car; but this surfaces doors, locks, windows, charge state, etc. and can easily be manipulated with Shortcuts’ “Get the state of Home” action.

I used Atom to edit the configuration.yaml file found in /.homeassistant, Terminal and iOS 12.

Links:





Kindly,
Orlando

6

I have done this job with my BMW 3. And the shortcuts I wrote support almost all the BMW series. Door-lock, door-unlock, climate control, getting car status, automatic lock and many other functions are supported with one click or shortcuts automation. However, the server is in china and you may modify the domains in the shortcuts. Please refer to the Chinese websites and you may use google translation:

  1. The download link of all the shortcuts of BMW
  2. The post of the shortcuts and discussions