To build any electronic device, you have to understand intimately how it’s made. That’s why we’re publishing a series of posts that explore how popular consumer electronics are put together.

Automatic is a device that plugs into a port under the dashboard, designed to connect your car to the rest of your digital life by giving you access to its parameters such as speed and telematics.

Interaction with the car

To better understand what Automatic does and how it does it, let’s briefly review what cars look like on the inside.

Modern vehicles are complex systems containing a network of sensors and Electronic Control Units (ECUs). An ECU is a module responsible for a particular part of the vehicle. For example, an Engine Control Module, or ECM, takes care of timing the ignition and air/fuel ratio inside the engine, and a Telematic Control Unit, or TCM, tracks a car’s position via GPS and communicates via a central server over a cellular connection.

A basic unit of data on this network is a PID (Parameter Identification), which are key:value pairs allowing the car’s parameters to be read without the need to address each ECU for it’s data.

This network is accessible to the outside world via an ODB-II port (located under the dashboard near the steering wheel). The purpose of this port is two-fold: to diagnose potential problems and control emissions.

Although the physical dimensions of the port are standard across all cars, electrical protocols differ depending on car manufacturer. Automatic supports four of them:

— ISO 15765–4 CAN (US standard since ‘08)

— SAE J1850 PWM (Ford) / VPW (GM)

— ISO 9141–2 (European, Asian and Chrysler)

— ISO 14230–4 KWP2000 (European, Asian and Chrysler)

Functionality

Automatic is not the first company to offer an interface to a car’s inner network. One of its main competitors is Kiwi, which offers a similar product. Kiwi’s app presents data on the dashboard, but does not offer anything beyond that.

Automatic differentiates itself by offering a more streamlined user experience and a whole ecosystem around the product.

Automatic works by making the information provided by a car’s inner sensors useful for drivers. It is useful for both businesses and individual drivers: for example, companies can track fuel usage and monitor car abuse in their fleet of vehicles and individual drivers can integrate their car data into their smart home, automize the repair process, or just stream the data to a dashboard.

Teardown

The adapter is fairly small and designed to be hidden from view when inserted into the port.

After removing the grey skirt around the connector part and front cover, we get a first look at its insides.