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Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

automatic.com

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Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#31

Post by rohansingh »

cordite wrote: post #4

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

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.

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#32

Post by jabberwik »

Anyone know a good alternative to this that isn't meant to be fleet-scale? Getting OBD data over Bluetooth is widespread enough, but their service also made it super easy to generate mileage expenses. Also downloading a CSV of all my trips made for some fun data crunching. I'd love to keep those things going even if it means self-hosting something.

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#34

Post by toomuchtodo »

rohansingh wrote: post #31
cordite wrote: post #4

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

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 ou…

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.

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#36

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

ricardobeat wrote: post #35

> With fewer consumers purchasing and leasing vehicles and drivers on the road, we unfortunately do not see a path forward for our business. Said like nobody will ever drive cars again. I'm perplexed at how quickly these businesses are deciding to fold.

There's very little money on the hardware space... plus if you're not charging an ongoing premium it may not be worth it.

What upsets me is seeing this hardware just become e-waste. I really dislike seeing perfectly functional hardware become unusable just because the company folds or something newer comes out. I ranted about the iphone 4 and how it's no longer possible to build software on that platform, especially since it's low power and could be used for any small project. My old Nexus 7 is still kicking (just slooow)

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#37

Post by partiallypro »

blakesterz wrote: post #30

I'd imagine that domain name is worth some serious case. Automattic (WordPress) and many others would probably love to scoop that up. I wonder if that's their most valuable asset now?

I was just thinking that Automattic should buy the domain and just point it to theirs. I guess it doesn't matter though, most people don't know what Automattic is, they know what Wordpress is.

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#40

Post by jdminhbg »

mrlambchop wrote: post #28
jdminhbg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to their App Store description: > We no longer recommend using the Automatic car adapter due to reliability issues. Do you happen to know if this is real or just a CYA? I'd pay $10 to extend the life of my adapter, but not if I needed to buy another device anyway.

Former VP Eng @ Automatic here :( There is an auth component needed for that BT connectivity to work - once the token expires, the BT connection won't authenticate anymore. i.e. if you uninstall the BT apps, change phone etc...

Thanks for the info, sorry about the outcome. I enjoyed having mine.
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