The Ultimate Office Chair: Hacking a BMW Comfort Seat with an ESP32

What happens when you mix German luxury engineering with a bit of DIY spirit? You get the world’s most over-engineered office chair.

This talk dives inside a BMW comfort seat — so when you get home in your 7-series, you can feel right at home in the same seat at your desk. Packed with ECUs, motors, pumps, heaters, ambient lighting and airbags, we’ll explore how it all works, how the seat communicates over CAN, j1850 CRCs, some quirks, and how an ESP32 can take control of everything from massage and lumbar support to heating and cooling, obviously all hooked up to homeassistant.

The hope is that this talk will inspire others to reuse car parts in interesting and wonderful ways. We'll also discuss slightly easier things like integrating an idrive controller or gearshifter which are much more common but rarely explained in detail how and why they work the way they do compared to a more complex device like a seat.