DIMO Electric Vehicle Data Collection Proposal Round 8

Part 1 - Proposal Submission

Name of Project: DIMO Onboarding Webapp and EV and AV Dataset

Proposal in one sentence: Develop a webapp to onboard more users, allowing them to share data directly from their electric vehicles (EVs) and publish that dataset to the Ocean Marketplace.

Description of the project and what problem is it solving:

Overview and Background

The data generated by vehicles (not even Autonomous Vehicles yet) is vast and rapidly growing in value. The problem is that today automakers are facebooking their customers. They have customers (car owners) sign away the rights to that data and resell it to data companies that operate walled gardens. Buyers of new cars are missing out on hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year.

Our vision, borrowing from crypto projects focused on data ownership like Brave or crypto incentives for users like Helium, is to reward EV owners who share their data with us. We are currently testing a mechanism for collecting that data using open hardware from AutoPi. DIMO will become an asset manager for that data on behalf of drivers, monetizing the data through marketplaces (our Streamr Data Union is already live), oracles, and other products.

Over time, we will need to manage many data marketplaces that include raw data, aggregated data, computed data, and everything in between. Cars are generating so much data, and there are so many applications for that data, that the journey of bringing that data out of the automaker silos and into the hands of Web3 developers and innovators will take time.

Project Detail

  1. New User Onboarding. To date all the cars we have onboarding for testing have been within our team and we are at a point where we need to bring on more users and more vehicles. To do so, we need a simple onboarding web form that will allow other users (under an alpha program) to sign up, request the hardware required, and eventually configure their data sharing.

All data is collected and stored securely with the permission of our users.

Grant Deliverables:

  • Develop the DIMO user onboarding webapp that will enable other users to sign up with DIMO and request the necessary hardware to begin sharing data.
  • Hire a UX designer to ensure that the user experience is a good experience (we are just back-end engineers right now).
  • Publish the first crowd-sourced EV dataset on OCEAN with data streamed directly from vehicles as opposed to collected in surveys.

Which category best describes your project? Pick one: Unleash data

Which Fundamental Metric best describes your project? Pick one.

Total Value Locked

What is the final product?: The final product will be a user-onboarding webapp through which a prospective DIMO user and data provider will signup, specify the vehicle they have, and request the hardware and account required in order to begin streaming their data to us so that we can provide it to the dataset hosted on Ocean.

How does this project drive value to the “fundamental metric” (listed above) and the overall Ocean ecosystem? This is best expressed as Expected ROI, details here.

Vehicle data could become the most lucrative data that an individual has the ability to monetize. Some estimate afford a value of around $500 per vehicle per year, others suggest the data will become worth more than the car itself.

Even taking the low estimate ($500 per vehicle) we only need to connect three dozen cars to deliver more value of the data acquired. With even a very basic web app to accept new users we anticipate that we can exceed this number.

  • Expected signups: 100 (we will artificially cap the number over the next few months as we work to improve our own product, but eventually this number will grow)
  • Value of each sign up: $500
  • Chance of success: 90%

($500*100 / $17,600)*0.9= 2.56

Funding Requested: $17,600

Proposal Wallet Address: 0xB068F7147724619A961494e55FdBB104468c90c8

Have you previously received an OceanDAO Grant (Y/N)? No

Team Website (if applicable): https://dimo.zone/

Twitter Handle (if applicable): @DIMO_Network

Discord Handle (if applicable): DIMO Discord

Project lead Contact Email: alex@dimo.zone

Country of Residence: USA

Part 2 - Proposal Details

Are there any mockups or designs to date?

One of our goals for this part of the project is to hire a designer for the webapp, so no mock ups of that piece in particular.

An overview of the technology stack?

User Onboarding Technology Stack

React

Data Collection Stack

Hardware:

  • Research and purchase an ARM(Raspberri PI) based OBD device.

  • Reverse-engineering the CAN data for a selected EV (KIA Nero, or Similar) - Creation of a DBC file for the vehicle model.

Software:

  • Payload design(including future extensibility in mind), based on Cloud Events - Develop software using Streamr SDK to send data to Streamr at configurable frequency.

Any prior work completed thus far?

We are already collecting vehicle data, so the middle piece (between onboarding new users and bringing that data to OCEAN is complete. We have intentionally chosen to test the connections before building a top of funnel element for new users.

What is the project roadmap? That is: what are key milestones, and the target date for each milestone.

V1: Sept 15

Testing: Sept 30

Bug fixes/deployment: October 12

Blog post/announcement: October

Please include the team’s future plans and intentions.

  • It’s our mission to provide car owners the best way to monetize their vehicle data. This data asset is incredibly valuabe and we believe that every driver should have the right to own it.
  • At the start we will only support a few types of electric vehicles and connected hardware, but we will expand this over time. We can make use of existing open source work like this open dbc project
  • We intend to open source our work on this too

Any maintenance?

  • We will need to continue to support and scale this onboarding mechanism as we bring more drivers into our network.

Foreseen or possible additions?

  • As mentioned above we intend to support more types of vehicles, and eventually more types of devices beyond vehicles as well.
  • Creation of a mobile app to allow users to pair and load an ERC20 wallet to the device.
  • Expansion to more datasets that include particular facets of the electric vehicle data useful to developers.

Team members:

Name: Hersh Patel

Role: developer, CTO designer

Relevant Credentials (e.g.):

GitHub: https://github.com/DIMO-INC

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yevgeny-khessin-994988b2/

Other:

Background/Experience: +10 years connecting millions of vehicles to the internet. Built dispatch systems for Ford AV. Product Architect for IOT Device Connectivity supporting millions of IOT devices.

https://github.com/DIMO-INC

1 Like

If I may ask, how dependent is the team on the grant to continue operations this month to reach your milestones of 15th Sep?
Could you do the UX work with freelance or you need to expand team on that? Trying to evaluate whether the success probability of 90% is realistically achievable based on your info or not.

Secondly, Streamr also provides grants for projects within their ecosystem https://streamr.network/fund/
Just to share.

Lastly, we can help you with UX for your projects if you need that rapidly and don’t have budgets. We are good at it and can do it nominally (if not free)

Best of luck

I like the idea of what you are trying to build here as is relates to a lot of mobility contexts in the Gaia-X domain. I will support this and thank you for bringing it forward.

Thanks for bringing Gaia-X to our attention. We’re definitely trying to engage those writing data standards and are in touch with the folks at Mobi.

Cipher

We have funds to continue building certain core parts of our data collection efforts, so we won’t be forced to stop working without the Ocean DAO grant. This grant is more about taking things up a level. Ultimately, the onboarding experience will be a key aspect of what we need to build to turn the whole project into a success, so it’s important we start resourcing that build appropriately with designers etc. We could certainly get something out to the public, but it would take us quite a bit longer and not probably have the impact that we need it to have.

We’ve been signing up more users without any workflow (totally word of mouth) at a clip of a few per week and we think that could really expand with a good onboarding experience, a new website (which we’re funding and build ourselves) and some marketing support (which we are also managing on our own right now). Given all of that in the works we think getting to our target of 100 cars in a few months is a achievable.

Appreciate you pointing out the Streamr grants. We have received a grant from Streamr to set up a data union and we pushed that live last week. You can see it here.

All of this is part of our vision to bring EV data to open data infrastructure across the Web3 world.