Measured on an A5191 rather than guessed at. The settings frame is not lost and it is not missed: it lands about half a minute after the read that asked for it, by which time that read has long returned. The value goes into the server's state and stays there — six polls afterwards all carried the same settingsAt, served from cache in a dozen milliseconds. What was missing was the second look. Nothing on the page took one, so a card that came up before the answer arrived stayed empty until something else happened to refresh it. That is the whole of "it doesn't always load". So a refresh that comes back without the settings half queues another, at six seconds, twelve, twenty-four, forty-five, and then stops. Bounded because the message the server asks with is one the reference reads as carrying an Anker bug: a charger that never answers is a real possibility, and a page left open all day must not poll one for ever. The patience resets per charger, and the chase stops on an error and on unmount. The previous attempt at this treated it as a wait that was too short and lengthened it from four seconds to twelve. That was the wrong half of the problem — the delay is thirty-odd — and waiting it out inside a UI request would be a poor trade. The longer wait is left where it is; it was not wrong, only insufficient. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
DriverVault
A car control & service-tracking system (originally "Car Control Project").
Built incrementally — starting with a car maintenance tracker (modeled on
Car Service.xlsx) and growing toward live integration with the car via a
cellular ESP32 device and third-party services (Toyota Connected, EV chargers).
Architecture
All clients communicate with the database only through the API Server — nothing talks to PocketBase directly.
┌──────────────────┐
Web App (Vue) ─────▶│ │
Phone App (Flutter)▶│ API Server │────▶ PocketBase
Home Assistant ────▶│ (Go, stdlib) │ (10.2.1.10:8027)
Car Agent (ESP32) ─▶│ │
└──────────────────┘
| Component | Stack | Status | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| API Server | Go (stdlib) | ✅ built, running, verified | API Server/README.md |
| Database | PocketBase | ✅ running, schema + seed done | — |
| Web App | Vue 3 + Vite + Tailwind v4 | ✅ full feature set (below) | Web App/README.md |
| Phone App | Flutter (Android) | ✅ web parity + biometric login | Phone App/README.md |
| Docker | Compose (multi-container / all-in-one) | ✅ deployment configs | Docker/README.md · Docker-AIO/README.md |
| Car Agent Device | ESP32 + SIM7600 (LILYGO TTGO) | 🚧 firmware in progress | Car Agent Device |
| Home Assistant Plugin | — | ⬜ later | — |
The Web and Phone apps are at feature parity.
Features
- Maintenance tracking — cars, service history (date/odometer + which parts were changed), and a per-car parts catalog, with next-due date/km status from the spreadsheet formulas.
- Technical checks — the mandatory roadworthiness inspections (przegląd techniczny / MOT / TÜV): result, cost, station and the certificate's valid-until, which overrides the car's interval and drives the next-due date.
- Maintenance log — workshop visits and repairs outside the routine schedule: type/status, workshop, parts used, labour + parts cost, invoice, warranty-until.
- Fuel tracking — refills with derived efficiency (average / best / worst consumption, cost per km, price per litre). Consumption is measured between full tanks, so partial fills roll into the next full one.
- Documents — insurance, registration, road tax and the rest, each with a server-computed renewal/expiry state.
- Reminders — date- and/or odometer-triggered, one-off or recurring, plus read-only reminders the server derives from documents and service records.
- Attachments — one optional file (PDF or image) per service record, technical check, maintenance entry, refill, document and part; fetched back through the API Server, never a public URL.
- Accounts — PocketBase-token login, profile + appearance preferences (theme/locale/date format/currency/font), avatar, email verification, data export/import, and an account-deletion state machine.
- Organizations & roles — multi-tenant
user/admin/superadminroles; admins manage users within their own organization, superadmins span all. Any user without an organization can create one and becomes its admin. - Per-user ownership & sharing — each car has an owner and can be shared with other users as read or write; the UI mirrors the server's access checks.
- Integrations — per-user connectors under a superadmin → org-admin → user cascade. Built-in today: Toyota Connected (read-only vehicle data), the Anker Solix V1 EV charger and the Greencell HabuDen wallbox (read over the owner's own MQTT broker — no Greencell cloud is involved). Apprise joins them as a server-wide connector rather than a per-user one: it hands a message to an Apprise gateway the operator runs, which fans it out to any of the 100+ services Apprise speaks.
- Cars from the manufacturer's own service — import a car straight off a connected account (MyToyota today), choosing what to pull in, and read everything that service knows about it from a dedicated first tab on the car. Generic over providers: the next manufacturer is one adapter in the API Server.
- EV charging control — for Anker Solix chargers the owner can start, stop and limit charging from the Charging screen over whichever of three transports their control mode picks: Anker's own cloud (commands ride the connection the charger already holds to Anker, so nothing has to be reachable — the mode for a charger on a customer's network), Modbus TCP on the local network, or an OCPP 1.6J Central System the charger dials back into.
- Translated UI — the interface reads its text from per-language files (English, Polish, Danish today), with English as the fallback for any untranslated string. See TRANSLATIONS.md.
- Phone biometric login & app lock — fingerprint / face sign-in with an app-lock that requires an unlock on relaunch. See the Phone App README.
Auth model
All apps share one auth model: authentication is PocketBase's own.
POST /api/auth/login is proxied to the PocketBase users collection and the
client keeps the token PocketBase minted — the API Server does not issue its
own JWT. Every protected request carries Authorization: <token> (both
Bearer <token> and a raw token are accepted) and the server re-resolves it
against PocketBase on each call, so a role change or a deletion takes effect
immediately. Tokens are stateless, so there is no per-device session list;
changing an account's password rotates its token key and invalidates every token
already issued. Access to cars/records is gated by per-user ownership and shares;
user management requires the admin or superadmin role. Creating an organization
is the one management action open to a plain user — it promotes them to admin of
the organization they just created.
Domain (from Car Service.xlsx)
- Cars — one per vehicle (was: one spreadsheet sheet), with spec fields (engine / transmission / differential oil, brake fluid, coolant, VIN, fuel type, build / first-registration dates, …) and configurable service intervals.
- Service records — date + odometer per service, plus which parts were changed (oil & oil filter, engine air filter, cabin air filter).
- Parts — per-car catalog of part numbers.
Key spreadsheet formulas, reproduced by the API Server on read:
Next Service Date = service date + serviceIntervalDays (default 365; Excel: =A+365)
Next Service Km = service km + serviceIntervalKm (default 15 000; Excel: =B+15000)
Intervals are configurable per car.
Getting started
Bring up the stack in this order — each app's README has the details:
- API Server — configure
.env, runsetup-pocketbase.mjs, start the server. This must be running for either app. - Web App —
npm install && npm run dev(proxies/apito the server). - Phone App —
flutter build apk/flutter runwith--dart-define=API_BASE=http://<server-ip>:8080/api.
Or skip all of that and bring the whole stack up with Docker, which runs the schema setup itself — see Docker (PocketBase + API Server + Web App as three containers) or Docker-AIO (all three in a single image).
Layout
DriverVault/
├── API Server/ # Go gateway to PocketBase (the only DB client)
├── Web App/ # Vue 3 + Vite + Tailwind v4 SPA + Go BFF
├── Phone App/ # Flutter (Android)
├── Car Agent Device/ # ESP32 + SIM7600 firmware (LILYGO TTGO T-SIM7600)
├── Home Assistant Plugin/ # later phase
├── Docker/ # Compose deployment (API Server + Web App)
└── Docker-AIO/ # single all-in-one image