I had a mad idea this evening. I have a few ESP8266s, essentially small, dirt cheap, wifi IOT modules. They can be used to make pretty simple stand-alone wifi devices, for example you can put a couple of push buttons, and maybe LEDs on one and use it to send commands over wifi, and receive confirmation back (if needed).
It occurred to me that it should be possible to use one of these stand alone as a battery powered simple remote, for doing stuff like starting and stopping charging, turning on cabin preconditioning, etc. One neat feature these things have is that they have a sleep mode, that drops their power consumption to ~20µA, low enough for one to run on a couple of AA cells for well over a year.
Needless to say, after a bit of digging around I discovered that someone else has already done something similar, and made a simple red push button to turn on preconditioning in his Tesla (it's about ten times bigger than it needs to be):
Still, I think it's worth looking at a bit more, as it has the potential to be able to make a relatively simple, long battery life, unit that could work a bit like a TV remote, and do some of the key functions that can be done by something like Teslafi, with just the push of a button, with no need to boot anything up, start an app, or whatever.
