yash-srivastava/Overdrive-release

Worth a look if you own a BYD with a DiLink v3 head unit and want always-on recording, parking surveillance and telemetry without a cloud subscription. Treat it as a vehicle integration project first, not a generic dashcam.

The problem

A stock BYD setup gives you a native dashcam and some app control, but nothing that watches the car while parked, alerts you when something gets close, or exposes battery, tyre pressure and charging state outside BYD's ecosystem. The usual workaround is a separate dashcam plus a hotspot, or manually pulling footage after an incident. OverDrive installs on the head unit itself, uses the car's existing cameras and parking radar, and turns them into continuous or event-triggered recordings with optional Telegram alerts. Afterwards the car records and reports on its own, and you browse clips in a calendar-style library.

What's different

The mechanism that matters is running inside the vehicle's Android head unit and calling BYD's own camera and sensor services. That enables proximity recording from the eight parking radar sensors, a real-time dashboard for CPU, GPU, memory and battery voltage, and an MQTT bridge into Home Assistant with sensors and optional controls. The README also describes optimizations aimed at keeping the app light — under 28% CPU, around 150MB memory and under 3s boot time — which matters on a head unit that must also run the car's normal software.

The trade-off is coupling. Proximity recording, camera arbitration, ACC state handling and the control entities all depend on BYD-specific SDK behavior, and the release notes show recurring fixes for camera signal loss, ACC state, PHEV battery readings and trip loss. That is normal for a young app working against an undocumented vehicle stack, but each update can change what works on your model. As alternatives, Home Assistant can reach an off-network broker through a Tailscale proxy or WireGuard tunnel, or you can skip HA and rely on the built-in terminal and Telegram notifications.

Who should try it

A good fit is a BYD owner with a DiLink v3 unit who already uses Home Assistant or is comfortable enabling Wireless ADB, and who specifically wants sentry recording and car telemetry in one place. Telegram alerts and local-only storage suit people who want notifications without handing video to a cloud service. A poor fit is anyone expecting official manufacturer support, or a car outside the documented DiLink v3 lineup — support has been added model by model (Yuan Pro, Sealion 6 DM-i, PHEV variants), so an unlisted model is a real compatibility question rather than a detail.

Requirements and limitations

The main prerequisite is Wireless ADB enabled on the head unit before first launch, plus a DiLink v3 BYD vehicle; the quick-start path is installing a pre-built APK on the head unit from the alpha release. There is no cloud account, but that also means no vendor backup or remote storage — recordings live on the device or SD card, and storage management is yours. Home Assistant control is off by default and must be enabled explicitly, and commands only work when the car is awake and reachable through the head-unit SDK; the app updates the entity optimistically and reconciles on the next telemetry refresh.

For remote broker access, the documented options are a Tailscale proxy or WireGuard tunnel rather than port forwarding, which adds a networking component you must keep running. Ongoing upkeep is the real cost: two update channels (Alpha and Braveheart) exist, and the changelog shows frequent model-specific fixes, so pick a channel deliberately and read release notes before updating. The app bundles third-party components such as cloudflared, zrok, sing-box, tailscale and YOLO11n under their own licenses, separate from the MIT-licensed app code.

HotRepo's take

HotRepo recorded the repo at #13 on the monthly Java board with +114 stars on 2026-10-25, but the sample spans only two recorded dates with no daily-board history, so persistence cannot be judged. The practical question before installing is narrower: confirm your exact BYD model and DiLink version appears in the release notes or supported list.