51–60 of 95 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 abunda…
Honestly, that kinda seems like something that makes sense to do server-side, especially if they were forced to implement some of those integrations in very kludgy and fragile ways (like screen scraping/form filling). Even if the calls were made directly from the customer's device, there's probably a background hum of development work needed just to keep the integrations working.
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…
Perhaps the choices you make and the time you spend on mitigating the possibility of your product becoming e-waste will make you more likely to fail, leading to a higher probability of your product becoming e-waste because most people won't bother re-flashing the hardware you're making.
Work on improving your product and making sure that you succeed.
> 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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 think that's absolutely great. I've had enough IoT products brick on me that I avoid most out of principle now. I'd change my mi…
Great feedback. A limited "no-cloud" mode is something we could possibly do, I'll think about it.
I think you are correct that it would really only be a small number of people who would be able to use our docs and write their own firmware for our device. But we want to make it relatively easy to switch between public firmware variants.
So even if you're not an engineer, you can choose to try a different flavor for your device. And if we have to completely shut down our services, you could do that as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you're spending a lot of time figuring out how to fail in such a way that your product doesn't become waste, you're probably working on the wrong things. Perhaps the choices you make and the time you spend on mitigating the possibility of your product becoming e-waste will make you more likely to fail, leading to a higher probability of your product becoming e-waste because most people won't bother re-flashing the…
Also consider:
1. The choices we make on mitigating the possibility of the product being waste can actually improve our product. For example, because the product can be reprogrammed easily, we can enter verticals that wouldn't be possible otherwise. Or because our hardware is well-architected and documented, it's easier for us to iterate on it.
2. If we fail because we couldn't figure out a way to make the product responsibly, that's a good thing. I'd rather we fail early than put out waste.
> 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.
Perhaps next time someone on HN is complaining about "yet another subscription" business, send them to this and 10k other posts as a reminder how good businesses die without proper revenue.
Having a subscription means it can disappear on you at any point.
If anyone has a device they’d like to sell, please contact me (in bio). [EDIT] Thank you to the wonderful hackers who reached out to me. I think that I am all set now.