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Ask HN: What's another application for our technology?

11 points by mojoe ↗ HN
My co-founder and I are developing hardware that will read diagnostic information from the OBD2 port on consumer automobiles and upload it to the internet via WiFi once the vehicle is parked. We are currently targeting customers who want an easy way to monitor their vehicle fleets for fuel theft, but we would really appreciate any other ideas regarding application of our technology. Essentially our system retrieves diagnostic information from vehicles (fuel information, engine statistics, etc, generic list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBD-II_PIDs), and then creates web-accessible graphs with the data.

Is there data from your car that you'd really like to see? Let us know so we can build it for you! And if you're in the Boulder/Denver area of Colorado and have a car fleet, let us know if you're interested in acquiring a beta device to try out the system (my email is in my profile). We appreciate any advice!

15 comments

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tocomment
What kind of information is available? It sounds really cool btw.
mojoe
Thanks, we're excited about it! This is a list of many of the parameters that can be obtained: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBD-II_PIDs

There are many more manufacturer-specific parameters, but we don't currently deal with those.

carlosn
I don´t know what information is available (and english isn´t my first language, so I may not know some terms), but off the top of my head, I think some performance data could be used to know if the engine needs adjustments (comparing fuel comsumption against what is expected for the usage might help), alerts for when the brakes need replacement, the locations where the car was turned off (to track if employees went where they were supposed to at the time time they were supposed to (a problem at my job)).

  Probably could have worded it better, but I´m out of practice with the language.
tocomment
You could do some kind of weather app with the ambient air temperature and air pressure readings?
mojoe
interesting! With a big enough pool of data this might be useful to meteorologists. The drawback would be poor sensor accuracy given the conditions car environment sensors are subjected to, but it might be worth investigating.
bedspax
Yeah!

Now that Weather is in the game with apps for the two most popular smartphone platforms, Kenny is looking to the next frontier: cars.

Voice-activated weather apps for the car would be "very useful and specific to the driver," says Kenny. "This will be a very interesting platform for us."

>> http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/talkingtech/201...

;)

bargl
I think there are a lot of things you could have this upload. Any sort of tracking, door locking/unlocking, automatic pushing of engine data.

You could also create a user interface that maps and assigns people to the cars they are using to work with drivers and get stats on the drivers in the fleet (i.e. who drives like crap).

On a larger scale you could also map when cars seem to get issues and create a metric of common issues for cars so that it could improve diagnostics in the future. Man this is just a really awesome idea!

mojoe
Nice ideas! I like the concept of mapping drivers to vehicle stats, and creating a database of issues that occur under specific conditions.
summerville
Would love to learn more. We have a fleet management software product (Fleetio - http://www.fleetio.com) and would love to discuss future integration capabilities. tsummerville at fleetio dot com
mojoe
I've seen your product, it's very slick. We'll definitely contact you about possible integration.
msprague
Hey Mojoe!

It's great that someone is finally doing this! Which company are you founding? Is it Fleetio or Automatic or something else? I've been trying to make a prototype of something similar to this using a raspberry pi and an OBD-II interface. Regardless, I've been kicking this idea around for some time so I'll toss a couple ideas at you that I've come up with.

-Environmental footprint/impact. OBDII offers emissions information (I think) and you could do some really cool "green" stuff with it if you wanted to go that direction.

-Could you make an easy-to-use API for the device and sell it to developers? This could be profitable, but might create competition for you...

-Online car problem troubleshooting? Upload the error code and specific car information to your site, and you can diagnose the car without having to pay for an expensive mechanic to look at it right away. (Kind of like bargl's idea)

-Assuming it could interface with a mobile device, you could mount a tablet in your car and display realtime information

-Reminders such as oil change or similar maintenance

mojoe
Hi msprague, thanks for the enthusiasm! We're actually discussing possible approaches to a public API for developers. We're still in early development and don't have a name yet, but if you send me a note at the email address in my profile we'll keep you up to date on our progress.
msprague
I don't think that there's an option to make your HN email public (yours isn't listed), so if you reply to this comment with it I can email you.
mojoe
Oops, noob mistake. stech.joe+hn at gmail dotcom