OBD with cell connectivity to notify my phone when Prius Plug-In is done charging

Hi there.

I've got a 2012 Prius Plug-In. I recently replaced the head unit with a Pioneer AVH-W4400NEX in order to get Android Auto running.

Anyhow, I had a week of competing with other car owners with poor manors around charging at a couple public lots around my work. On a few of the days of leaving my car next to the charger spaces with the charging port door open, I'd come back with the door shut and something like a 25%-50% charge. Not really sure what was happening.

I Google around and found this thread here on PriusChat discussing how the Entune premium features are only available on the Advance trim, and I only have a Basic one. One of the features is to report back to a mobile app what the current charge state of the car is, which is basically a thing I want now. So I don't have the advance trim, nor do I have the original head unit anymore.

Anyhow, I want to know if anyone's stumbled across an OBD device that can provide the same functionality? It seems like all of the OBD devices that are tied to a service, like Carista or Automatic, don't provide anything special for PHV cars.

 

More Googling, I think I just found the solution for me.

Search in Github for EVNotify.

 

I didn't lose any of the buttons. Search for something called the Meastro RR. You'll need the additional Toyota harness.

The only thing I really lost was anything related to the Entune software, and having the head unit screen also display some hybrid stats (in addition to the dashboard). I mixed up ordering parts and didn't have a good adapter to use for the built in car GPS, so I just used the one that came with the head unit. Reverse cam works just fine. I did need to modify the cabling that came with the Meastro in order to use other OBD devices via a splitter in addition to the Pioneer's ODB plug without it randomly turning on when the car was off.

If we had bought a Prius Plug-In with the advance trim, I think I would have thought twice before upgrading the head unit just for this mobile app notification feature.

 

Sorry, I should have given an update here.

After some investigation I found that there's no way to get state of charge over ODB when the car isn't in "Ready" mode. The next thought I had was to take apart the paneling on the interior of the car near where the charging port is and attach something like an rpi to the leads coming off of the charging indicator light (or trace them back to somewhere sensible to install hardware). At which point I decided this is more trouble than it's worth, sadly, and have put a pin in the project.