Two weeks ago I introduced AutoTLM — our own car-telemetry platform, built in the open, on the idea that your car should feel like a dev board and your data should land on a server you own. That post ended with "now the real build begins." This is the progress report. No secret sauce, just where we actually are.
The library grew up
AutoTLM Core — the open-source, MIT-licensed Arduino library at the center of all this — went from v0.1.0 to v0.9.0 in two weeks. The headline you can feel: it now walks the whole car. Not just the engine, but every module a scan tool would talk to — transmission, ABS, body — each with its own trouble codes and its own VIN handshake. There are eight example sketches now, and the whole surface is still the same friendly shape: a complete telemetry unit — OBD-II, GPS, motion, and a cloud push — in about fifteen lines of Arduino.
The other big one is provisioning. You can set the unit up from a phone browser, and change its WiFi from your phone over Bluetooth — and it tests the new network while holding the old one, so a typo can never strand a device that's bolted under a dashboard. That's the kind of feature you only think to build after you've stranded a device under a dashboard.
Software you can use today
The point of the last two weeks was to make AutoTLM real without waiting on hardware. So:
- AutoTLM Studio (v0.7.2) — a free Windows cockpit with a built-in simulated car. No hardware, no account required to look around. Pick a drive scenario, pin any signal, inject a fault code, and watch the CHECK ENGINE light and freeze-frame behave like the real thing while decoded OBD-II traffic scrolls by.
- TLMscript (v0.2.1) — a friendlier little language on top of Core. Car logic in a few readable lines —
when coolant > 110C: alert— that compiles down to a native Core sketch. - The DevKit (v0.3.0) — a ready-to-run receiving backend, so your sketch has somewhere to push to in one
npm start. - Cloud + Dash — both live, on real per-user accounts. One login carries across the phone app, the dashboard, and the cloud; live gauges, maps, trip replay and plain-English fault decode in the browser.
It took its first live drive
The milestone I've been quietly proud of: AutoTLM has now streamed live OBD + GNSS + motion data from a moving car straight to our own dashboard. Not a bench mock — the actual loop, on an actual road.
The numbers we can stand behind
"Benchmarks" is a strong word for a project this young, so let me be honest about what these are: they're the figures we've measured on real gear and now design around.
- Sub-second cloud pushes over weak cellular. The fix, as I wrote last time, was to drop TLS, POST plain HTTP, and cache the resolved IP so DNS happens once. Pushes went from multi-second coin flips to under a second, every time, even at a bad signal.
- ~4 telemetry updates per second with no internet at all. The phone app reads the car directly over Bluetooth — tunnels, basement garages, past the last bar — then hands back to the cloud on its own when you're in range.
- ~40 ms scripted reactions. A TLMscript rule that trips (say, an overheat guard) fires an out-of-cycle telemetry frame the network task services on its very next pass — roughly forty milliseconds when WiFi's up.
- A twelve-satellite GNSS fix indoors once we found the mis-wired, undocumented RX pin. Every hardware project has one of those; that was ours.
In your pocket
There's an iPhone app now — live gauges, trip replay, and what the check-engine light actually means in plain English — plus Apple CarPlay, with five pinned gauges and your fault codes on the car's own screen. Apple granted the Driving Task entitlement the day we applied. It's in closed beta, and I'll say the honest part out loud: CarPlay is simulator-tested so far, not yet run on a physical head unit, and there's no public download link. Want in? Email [email protected].
Where we're at
So: the whole software side — Core, Studio, DevKit, TLMscript, Cloud, Dash — is live and free to use today. The hardware — the programmable AutoTLM One dongle and the sealed Car-Emulator "car in a box" — is the part still on the bench, in development, not yet purchasable and not yet priced. That's the whole map, no asterisks.
Build with AutoTLM Core. Script it with TLMscript. Watch it in Studio. That's real, right now — and the hardware is coming.