Build Apps for Cars on the New Automatic Developer Platform | Hacker News Reader

Build Apps for Cars on the New Automatic Developer Platform

developer.automatic.com

124 pointsthejo48 comments

I didn't know there was already a second generation Automatic.

I pre-ordered the first one and had a lot of problems with it constantly losing connection and not tracking trips. I checked the app a few times to find out that data was just not collected, and it was just cumbersome to get the device to reconnect, with having to turn off my engine and do a dance to get it to talk to my car, that it just became a pain and sat in my glove box for months.

Hope they've fixed these issues, but I'm skeptical about buying a 2nd gen after that experience.

I'm sorry you did not have a great experience with our first gen device. We're announcing the second generation device today with the developer platform. The connectivity issues some of our users experienced with the first gen device were mainly due to BTLE. The second gen device has MFi support which allows us to support classic Bluetooth with iPhones. It's much more reliable. You must have received an email with a discount code. I hope you try it. We're also happy to help you get to the bottom of your issues if you write to support@automatic.com.

OK thanks maybe I'll contact support - I have to say though that the SDK looks very exciting, especially the streaming events. Kudos on fixing on this very opaque part of car maintenance.

Bought two devices one of myself, one for a family member. Both had same issues as parent. Support's response was basically "too bad, here's a list of things you can try every morning to maybe fix the problem." Never buying Automatic again, and I wonder when we'll hear about lawsuits if their emergency features fail during a car accident.

You should offer discounts to all who kickstarted your product. I'm also disappointed and don't look at the app anymore as it's missing trips and because we share a car with my wife, trips either get registered to her or my phone when we're in the car together. Haven't you thought about this basic use case?

I would assume that the most basic use case is one car, one driver... Nearly every person I know that would care about having a device like this meets these criteria.

How, exactly, would you expect it to work with two phones in the same car? It's not like it could tell which of you is driving...

I guess my argument is that it is likely less 'basic' than you think. Having two people share a car, and both interested in accessing their data, sounds like an edge case.

I imagine that it'd be easier to either get rid of one of your accounts so everything goes to one single account, or have multiple plugs, and you swap out based on who is driving.

Also, I got a discount as an original kickstarter. You should check your email/spam folder to see if you got one as well.

In my case I have one car and one account but my wife is usually driving in the morning and drops me off. So those trips get chopped in half and messes up the data. I basically use it only as a novelty at this point.

I could set it up on her phone but then we have the two phones problem. Obviously she isn't the driver all the time so I can't just delete it from my phone either.

Ideal would be to connect two phones to one account and if one phone disconnects then resume the trip on the other phone. If the data is in their cloud anyway this should be possible.

I have the exact same situation (1st Gen Link). I take the public transport to office and my wife drives the car during the day. So, the app only registers data when I'm driving (evenings/weekends). All the data during the day is not registered :(.

Perhaps the 2nd Gen Link solves this, now that it has a built-in GPS?

Also, of late, it's been really troubling me connecting to my iPhone 6. I have a support ticket open with Automatic, where they basically suggested deleting and re-installing the Automatic iOS App. Going to try that today to see if it works.

I'm considering getting the 2nd Gen Link, but would love to know if these issues have been resolved. Also, a discount would be nice :D!

Never said it's most basic, but it's basic across the globe. Only in America a car per person is the most common case. I do live in Orange County where there are more cars than people, but I work from home and I don't need to maintain a car that stays in the garage 99% of the time.

How do I expect it to work? I do have an NFC tag in the car where the person driving places the phone. Automatic can ship with a sticker tag like that.

Request a Massdrop here: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/automatic-smart-driving-assista...

P.S. You're right - I got a $20-off loyalty discount. Thank you, Automatic! It's definitely worth the upgrade at least for having the built-in GPS!

I had the exact same problems. It simply didn't want to connect to my android devices half the time. There was no point in collecting all that data if half of it was missing. Was thoroughly disappointed with that pre-order.

Completely agree. Why would you trust these guys again? I won't. I didn't sign up to be a system administrator for my truck, and they see no problem with shipping hardware that can't do the ONE THING that they claim to sell it for. Track trips - maybe!

I bought the first one as well. Huge waste, since it was not clear when I bought it that it wouldn't support my VW TDI (Diesel) engine.

edit: just got the email about supporting my TDI a few minutes ago

We did not support Diesel cars when we launched two years ago. We do now. You can continue to use the device you have now if you car is model year 2006 or later, but please drive for a bit and let the firmware update to the latest version. The latest generation of the hardware supports Diesel as well.

It was very clearly mentioned in various places on our website that Diesel cars were not supported before we added support, but we're happy to give you a refund if you missed it and never got to use the product. Please send an email to support@automatic.com and point them to this comment and they'll take care of it for you.

I had pre-ordered in March of 2013, and tested it upon receipt of the device that September.

Glad to know support now exists, but the device was sent to a thrift shop many many months ago.

No worries on a refund now, it was just frustrating at the time :)

That sucks yours didn't work out, but I just want to contrast the others here to say that my Automatic worked (and works) great in both my 2000 Honda Accord and my VW Jetta.

I've had a few minor connection issues, but over all it's been very solid when connected to my iPhones.

It definitely helped me adjust my driving habits.

I also have a 1st Gen Automatic that I got with the launch/pre-order. Same issues! I have a 2nd one I ordered last year for our other car ... same problem there.

It mostly just won't connect, seems far worse with the iPhone 6 than it was with the 5S. I tried Automatic Support, but didn't get very far beyond "iOS is killing the app due to memory".

When it works it's great! I'm also skeptical about buying a 2nd gen. Would love this to work properly!

My friend and I built something similar to this a few years back, but we never found the right audience. Here's the old kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1847359812/motobox-conn...

Ours connected to WiFi in driveways and dumped all driving data to servers that users could connect to via an API and web tool. I suspect our messaging and graphics were not polished enough, even though our hardware and software was cool.

I'd be really curious to find out what the most popular use of this "Automatic" device is. I'm always excited to hear about new uses for automotive data.

I'm browsing this website for 5 minutes, and still dont fully understand what they offer. Do they offer an api to get data of their own drivers on the road? Or do they offer an api to get data of any car out there? Or do they have a box you need to install in your car, which has a built in rest api to get the data you need? I think the initial value this company provides should be more clear on the landing page.

From what I gather, it's a bluetooth device that you plug into your cars OBD-II port. That transmits data from your car to your smart phone. Your phone, then, transmits the data to automatic.

So, you can look at daily gas mileage stats, error codes, and things like that. I assume the GPS parts come from the phone itself (while in the car).

The idea sounds interesting but I wouldn't want the data to be transmitted to the cloud. I'd also be worried that the data might be permissible in court if you were in an accident, for example. As a result, they might see that you were going 10 over at the time of the accident or that you had been doing so 2 minutes down the road. Lots of invalid conclusions can be made on such data and I wouldn't want to share it.

Ah indeed. Good point about privacy. Also they are not available in Europe.

Ok i found that this is just the developer portal for www.automatic.com.

It's something which plugs into the CAN port of your car and sends the diagnostic data from there to your phone.

Seemed pretty straightforward to read to me

Hi TeeWEE, imagine if every car had an API that you could build apps for and drivers could give you access to the data via OAuth. That's basically what the developer platform lets you do. We have a REST API, real-time events via webhooks / websockets and a direct Bluetooth API to the car for mobile clients to access data from the CAN bus directly.

Progressive Insurance offers a similar product, but the way the collected data is used isn't precisely defined. For example, it may try to raise your insurance premium if you exceed the speed limit, even though you're keeping pace with traffic flow (a common situation in the US).

I actually participated in the program a couple of years ago. You used it for 6 months and it monitored your driving looking for things like rapid acceleration/deceleration -- I assume that's what leads to most accidents. It also tracked time of day as an indicator of how risky you are to insure. When I used it, it was only used to discount your insurance if you were a good driver by their metrics, not increase any premiums.

For Android developers who don't want to get locked into Automatic as a platform I recommend the Torque app. It has the same basic functionality, costs less, supports a variety of third-party Bluetooth OBD2 readers, and provides a plugin development API.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.prowl.torq... http://torque-bhp.com/

Does torque give an api to access that data?

yes http://torque-bhp.com/wiki/PluginDocumentation

Yup, here's what I did with Torque http://ryancompton.net/2015/02/28/mpg/

The actual car events listed on their website is incredibility limited. Anyone who has spent time dealing with OBD-II ports, canbus, etc. knows that getting access to data beyond basics like RPM, Speed, and maybe braking (Mode 1 PIDs) is typically vendor specific and can vary between years of the same model, let alone models within the same manufacturer.

Someone mentioned VW below. Remember, there has been discussion that the automotive vendors want to lock access to OBD-II/Canbus info.

You're absolutely right that there is a lot more information in cars than we expose right now. What we're announcing today is the first step. The goal is to continue to expose more and more data over time via simple to use APIs.

Does anyone know if this works for any bluetooth obd-ii adapter? I have another one I've used with Dash but wasn't sure if it will work with Automatic or if they use proprietary hardware/software.

Hey, is there any difference between this hardware and your typical OBD-II Bluetooth adapter? In case not, they could market the app separately and allow people to use their existing adapters.

The last thing we wanted to do was build hardware! But, we could not deliver the experience we wanted to without building it. This blog post describes some of the reasons we built hardware - http://blog.automatic.com/why-we-built-the-link/

If you want to learn more about the latest generation hardware - https://www.automatic.com/adapter/

@thejo so if we buy the 2nd Gen Link, will it keep exposing more data, simply via firmware upgrades, or will there be a 3rd Gen Link, at some point? I guess my question is, will these features be purely firmware-based, or will they actually require upgrades to the Link hardware as well?

Wow! It does look like you did some serious work on the hardware part. Thanks for getting back!

What do you guys use to collect / aggregate / store / analyze your users' data? Do you do any kind of aggregate analysis to get insights into patterns / behaviours?

We store the data in Apache Spark using Databricks and Spark Streaming. We are working on a bunch of really cool aggregate analysis that we plan to surface in the app. Things like how does my car perform vs cars in my same class.

https://spark-summit.org/east-2015/talk/spark-plugs-into-you...

We have to be really careful about user's privacy, so we haven't released much yet other than our dashboard: https://dashboard.automatic.com, but I think we'll be able to start pushing insights directly into the app in the next release.

Best Regards, Rob Ferguson Director of Engineering Automatic Labs https://twitter.com/RobFergusonIII

Shameless plug: have you checked out mnubo.com? We provide a complete data pipeline, from ingestion to visualization, for connected devices like yours. PM me at bborowin@mnubo.com if you'd like know more.

I've never thought about this because I don't even own a car anymore. Essentially it's a device that converts diagnostic data to a standardized format (and displays this in a corresponding app)? +now you can use the data in your own apps

Is the app required or is there a device that I can plug in, read data for a while, unplug and get the data to a desktop (like a usb key)...because that would be interesting for me. Anything with a mobile connection...scares me :D

Data logging software has been around for a long time that does exactly that. Some quick searching for your car should turn up some results.

Yes I searched for it and there seems to be plenty of stuff for specific manufacturers or models but I didn't find anything that is universally useful and converts everything to a unified JSON or XML format. Sorry if that wasn't clear. And like I said I don't own a car :D

Concerns that was brought up on another forum was the distribution of user information to third-parties ie. insurance, auto manufactures, etc. I was able to test the first iteration of the product a year ago and noticed it worked fine for basic needs (seamless UI experience, useful information) but it wasn't useful after a week of use.

I wish you had international shipping. I have an OBD adapter but no good application.

We've started accepting international pre-orders today!

I really hope you've had some good legal advice on your international returns policy: In particular I imagine that "our policy cannot cover damage incurred during shipment" is not going to prevent CC chargebacks if that were to happen.

Looks like part of the movement into a world where I need to “sign in” before I'm allowed to build software. I'm sure Orwell would love this but I don't.

The real question, given your reaction, is why you'd want to build software for a closed platform?

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