4 ms·

They made my unit end of life, and then found themselves at end of life. This is IoT.

ashtonkem 6y ago
And that’s why the only IoT devices I’ll buy use Zigbee (ZWave works too). You can’t shut down a device that I control internet access to. Sadly this doesn’t scale, it takes specialized skills and time to build out home automation using these technologies.
- jcutrell 6y ago
  It’s gotten easier with Home Assistant but still, even as an engineer I prefer to use the easy APIs for these things sometimes than run my own support system for the Z-stuff
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    HA isn’t the hardest system I’ve ever setup, but I doubt many non-engineers could do it. I’m thankful it exists, but I’d love to see if someone can create something easier for the general public to setup and use.
- joshstrange 6y ago
  Same here, I wouldn't touch wifi-devices unless I there was no other alternative (not been the case yet with the exception of my robot vacuum but it runs on a schedule anyways and I manually trigger it 1-5 times a year). Z-wave all the way. I'm currently a SmartThings user but I'm sort of considering switching to Hubitat. Probably wait till my existing hub dies or ST does something shady/anti-consumer.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    I’m using Zigbee2mqtt on HomeAssistant. Harder to setup than smart things, but even more personal control.
thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
What did they make? Their site doesn't have any info on their products.
- cordite 6y ago
  an ODB port device, which connects with bluetooth to your phone. It records how gas-efficient your driving is, as well as beeping when you go over 80 mph or have a hard break. It tried to gamify your driving behavior to be more efficient and safe. And I think it was effective but from the start it's been tied to the cloud. At the start they'd send weekly reports of driving behavior, congratulating or saying what could be done better. As well as tracking (with location data on the phone) where you drove. I once used it to expense milage for a conference. However the emails soon stopped coming as frequently or reliably, then a year later when the emails stopped they said they were discontinuing my unit, encouraging me to buy the new one. I did not, as they failed to provide me with the service they promised. EDIT: to clarify, the phone app would start upon bluetooth connection, and send the data to Automatic. I'm not sure if it was realtime or not.
  - apple4ever 6y ago
    That's the first version. The second and third versions connected directly over the cell networks. The second version allowed third party apps over bluetooth. The third version removed that feature.
wh-uws 6y ago
I just bought one of these about a month ago, I read about how the company had just discontinued the old version of the product in the reviews on Google play of their app figured I'd have some decent time with it since they just rolled out the version I bought... Jokes on me! Any chance there's some way we could get the data out of them with something open source?
- shervinafshar 6y ago
  They do seem to have an export feature[1]. The dashboard has been "Loading trips..." for minutes to download into a CSV a measly number 2K trips I had. I'm sorry that people are losing jobs over such closure, but usually the writing is on the wall. [1]: https://help.automatic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000599847-How-do-I-download-export-my-driving-data- https://help.automatic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000599847-Ho...
  - mrlambchop 6y ago
    Sorry - the servers are overloaded right now with everyone grabbing their data. And yes, we did scale things up! Hitting RDS limitations :(
rohansingh 6y ago
I'm working on a IoT device and this is something that my cofounders and I have discussed a fair bit. While we want to succeed, we know that most businesses fail, and we don't want to put out products that become waste. We're working on mitigating this by having an open hardware platform. The idea being that, even if our cloud service isn't up, you can re-flash the hardware to do anything you want. And you can use our documentation to do it so you don't have to reverse-engineer everything from scratch. I'd like to see more companies follow this approach. I've at least a handful of IoT devices that are effectively bricked, which sucks because I know they have decent and usable innards.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  You should also consider open sourcing your cloud service in the event of shutdown. A repo with a Dockerfile should be sufficient, that could be turned into Digital Ocean droplet configs and similar one-click launches.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  Do you think that Automatic needed to have a cloud service? Their primary use case seems to have been uploading mileage data to a variety of expense reporting systems. I don't see any reason that has to go from the OBDII dongle through the now-discontinued Automatic servers, and only then pass to the actual endpoint. These IoT devices (and especially the phones and PCs that typically act as intermediaries) are abundantly capable of storing the configuration data and doing the API calls necessary to communicate with online services. Is it just about the control?
  - rohansingh 6y ago
    It's probably more about control than cost. Our company's product is similar to Automatic's, in that, in theory, you could have everything be done on-device and not need a proprietary backend at all. Other than the fact that this is difficult to keep up-to-date and working, it increases the hardware cost significantly. Instead of having a very cheap microcontroller handling everything, you might need something more capable and more expensive. Development cost goes up too, since instead of writing your integrations in Python, Go, JS, or whatever, you need to write your integrations on your embedded system.

And that’s why the only IoT devices I’ll buy use Zigbee (ZWave works too). You can’t shut down a device that I control internet access to. Sadly this doesn’t scale, it takes specialized skills and time to build out home automation using these technologies.

jcutrell 6y ago
It’s gotten easier with Home Assistant but still, even as an engineer I prefer to use the easy APIs for these things sometimes than run my own support system for the Z-stuff
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  HA isn’t the hardest system I’ve ever setup, but I doubt many non-engineers could do it. I’m thankful it exists, but I’d love to see if someone can create something easier for the general public to setup and use.
joshstrange 6y ago
Same here, I wouldn't touch wifi-devices unless I there was no other alternative (not been the case yet with the exception of my robot vacuum but it runs on a schedule anyways and I manually trigger it 1-5 times a year). Z-wave all the way. I'm currently a SmartThings user but I'm sort of considering switching to Hubitat. Probably wait till my existing hub dies or ST does something shady/anti-consumer.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  I’m using Zigbee2mqtt on HomeAssistant. Harder to setup than smart things, but even more personal control.

thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago

What did they make? Their site doesn't have any info on their products.

cordite 6y ago
an ODB port device, which connects with bluetooth to your phone. It records how gas-efficient your driving is, as well as beeping when you go over 80 mph or have a hard break. It tried to gamify your driving behavior to be more efficient and safe. And I think it was effective but from the start it's been tied to the cloud. At the start they'd send weekly reports of driving behavior, congratulating or saying what could be done better. As well as tracking (with location data on the phone) where you drove. I once used it to expense milage for a conference. However the emails soon stopped coming as frequently or reliably, then a year later when the emails stopped they said they were discontinuing my unit, encouraging me to buy the new one. I did not, as they failed to provide me with the service they promised. EDIT: to clarify, the phone app would start upon bluetooth connection, and send the data to Automatic. I'm not sure if it was realtime or not.
- apple4ever 6y ago
  That's the first version. The second and third versions connected directly over the cell networks. The second version allowed third party apps over bluetooth. The third version removed that feature.

wh-uws 6y ago

I just bought one of these about a month ago, I read about how the company had just discontinued the old version of the product in the reviews on Google play of their app figured I'd have some decent time with it since they just rolled out the version I bought... Jokes on me! Any chance there's some way we could get the data out of them with something open source?

shervinafshar 6y ago
They do seem to have an export feature[1]. The dashboard has been "Loading trips..." for minutes to download into a CSV a measly number 2K trips I had. I'm sorry that people are losing jobs over such closure, but usually the writing is on the wall. [1]: https://help.automatic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000599847-How-do-I-download-export-my-driving-data- https://help.automatic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000599847-Ho...
- mrlambchop 6y ago
  Sorry - the servers are overloaded right now with everyone grabbing their data. And yes, we did scale things up! Hitting RDS limitations :(

rohansingh 6y ago

I'm working on a IoT device and this is something that my cofounders and I have discussed a fair bit. While we want to succeed, we know that most businesses fail, and we don't want to put out products that become waste. We're working on mitigating this by having an open hardware platform. The idea being that, even if our cloud service isn't up, you can re-flash the hardware to do anything you want. And you can use our documentation to do it so you don't have to reverse-engineer everything from scratch. I'd like to see more companies follow this approach. I've at least a handful of IoT devices that are effectively bricked, which sucks because I know they have decent and usable innards.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
You should also consider open sourcing your cloud service in the event of shutdown. A repo with a Dockerfile should be sufficient, that could be turned into Digital Ocean droplet configs and similar one-click launches.
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Do you think that Automatic needed to have a cloud service? Their primary use case seems to have been uploading mileage data to a variety of expense reporting systems. I don't see any reason that has to go from the OBDII dongle through the now-discontinued Automatic servers, and only then pass to the actual endpoint. These IoT devices (and especially the phones and PCs that typically act as intermediaries) are abundantly capable of storing the configuration data and doing the API calls necessary to communicate with online services. Is it just about the control?
- rohansingh 6y ago
  It's probably more about control than cost. Our company's product is similar to Automatic's, in that, in theory, you could have everything be done on-device and not need a proprietary backend at all. Other than the fact that this is difficult to keep up-to-date and working, it increases the hardware cost significantly. Instead of having a very cheap microcontroller handling everything, you might need something more capable and more expensive. Development cost goes up too, since instead of writing your integrations in Python, Go, JS, or whatever, you need to write your integrations on your embedded system.