Announcing the EON Dashcam DevKit

You all know comma.ai for its dashcam software chffr. chffr runs on iOS and Android, and is just about the best dashcam experience you can get…in an app. But we want to go beyond that, so we built a dedicated device.

Today, we are selling the EON Dashcam DevKit, a dedicated hardware dashcam. It runs chffrplus, which ports over some of sensor and management niceties from openpilot. No need to start an app and mount your phone — EON sits there waiting for you, and starts when you begin driving.

Of course, EON and chffrplus integrate seamlessly into the rest of the comma.ai ecosystem. Your drives are uploaded to the cloud, where you can view them from your iOS or Android phone in chffr. EON can also connect over USB to panda to log all the sensors from your car, which you can then explore in chffr or cabana.

Note: This product is not designed to drive a car. This product is designed to be a dashcam.

More than just a dashcam

We don’t just want to be a dashcam, though we do that really well. We want to replace your existing low quality OEM dashboard. We want to make you love your in-car experience.

EON is built on top of NEOS, a custom Android fork designed for stability and simplicity. But since it’s based on Android, we get some nice things, like the Waze and Spotify apps! Quality navigation, music, and a dashcam, all in one device. Waze and Spotify, not Navteq and Pandora.

Accessories

Assuming you have a USB port to charge it in your car, EON comes with everything you need to get started. It includes two mounts, two USB cables, a home charger, and a replacement top piece to change the mounting angle.

If you want to read the sensors from your car, you need a panda. The panda also doubles as a great EON charger! And if you want to get your panda in even deeper and read your car’s radar, you need a giraffe, supported on select Honda and Toyota.

Hackable and Open Source

chffrplus and NEOS, the software and operating system of the EON, are both open source. In the chffrplus settings, you can configure EON as a WiFi hotspot, then ssh in to it.

It comes with tmux, clang, vim, Python, numpy, scipy, and much more all preinstalled. It’s a nice environment to develop in.

comma.ai Vision

We are going to be the Android of self driving cars. We don’t want to live in a world where 15 different auto OEMs design the operating systems for their cars. We lived in that world for far too long with phones.

The phone world has collapsed to two real players: Apple and Google. Tesla is the Apple of self driving, but they need an Android to keep them on their toes. That’s what we are doing. We are building a high quality self driving experience for the rest of the cars.

The first step was building a great universal car interface, and I think we did that with panda. The second step is getting some powerful sensors and compute hardware into your car, and EON is working toward that.

Check out our newly revamped website. It has design now. And follow us on Twitter to watch the future play out.