The app
Codriver
An Android app that reads your own car, keeps its history, and helps you decide what to do about what it finds. It works offline; the parts that need a connection say so and degrade quietly when there isn't one.
Drive mode
Dock the phone and it becomes the dashboard.
Turn the phone sideways and the three things you want while moving — music, the map, and the speed dial with its gear and engine readouts — sit on one screen you can read at a glance. Above them, a road rule for the moment: Rule 94 as you set off, and others as the drive goes on.
Drive
What the car is doing, right now.
Live speed, revs, coolant temperature, fuel level and consumption, with plain-language health checks rather than a wall of numbers. Everything comes from documented, standard SAE J1979 parameters — no manufacturer-specific write commands are ever sent to your car.
When the adapter is not connected it says so, plainly, and tells you what went wrong. Nothing pretends to be live.
Data
Every parameter, every code.
Every parameter your ECU supports, charted as it changes. Stored and pending fault codes with what they actually mean, freeze-frame data from the moment the fault was recorded, and emissions readiness — which matters the week before an inspection.
The code lookup covers the generic SAE set and the codes Mazda defines for itself. Anything it does not have, the assistant can translate.
Garage
The car's history, kept for you.
Trips log themselves. Fill-ups become fuel economy measured full tank to full tank, which is the only way to measure it honestly. Service items track distance and time and tell you before they are overdue, never after.
Items badged Mazda carry the maker's own intervals and advice — which oil, where the filter is, how long the job takes.
Assist
Parking, cameras, and help when you need it.
A top-down parking view fed by your own ESP32 distance sensors, and live camera feeds from your own ESP32-CAM boards. Your hardware, your network — nothing goes through us.
The same tab holds the assistant, an emergency button that rings your contacts in the order you set, and the spot where you parked.
Music
What is on the phone, and YouTube, in one queue.
Audio files already on the phone and audio from YouTube, in one queue, playing in the background. Signing in with Google is optional and read-only: it exists so your own playlists appear in the list instead of you pasting a link at every journey.
The assistant
You can ask questions in plain words — "why is it drinking fuel", "is this code serious", "what does a P0420 actually cost to fix" — and get an answer that has your car's actual figures in front of it. Voice works while driving, hands on the wheel.
Your question is passed through our server to an AI provider and the answer comes back to your phone. The content of questions, answers and audio is not stored; only usage counts, so quotas can be enforced. That is spelled out in the privacy policy.
Finding a workshop
When a fault code comes up, Codriver can go straight from the code to the people who handle it — a lean-mixture code to diagnostics and fuel injection, a brake warning to brakes — nearest first. The same directory is browsable on this site, and it reads without an account so it works the moment the app opens.
Your records, on more than one phone
Everything works with no account at all: the records live on the phone and are yours. Signing in adds cloud backup and sync across your phones, the community rooms, and the assistant. There is a 14-day trial, and after that it is a subscription — ZMW 50 a month or ZMW 500 a year, paid by mobile money.
If you never sign in, none of your car's data reaches us. If you do, what is stored and what is never stored is listed item by item in the privacy policy.
What you need
- An Android phone or tablet.
- An OBD-II adapter — Bluetooth Classic, BLE or Wi-Fi — for anything that reads the car.
- Optionally, your own ESP32 sensor or camera boards for the parking and camera views.
It was built and tested against Mazda's SKYACTIV range, and reads standard diagnostic parameters that any compliant car publishes.
Safety
Set the app up while parked. The parking view is a convenience, not a safety system — no failure detection, no redundancy, no certification. Displayed figures come from the diagnostic port at a few samples per second and can lag or drop out; the car's own dashboard is always the authority. Keep looking where you are going, and follow the road laws where you are.