Looks like Ather didn’t like my work

Pillion is offline, as of today.

Ather Energy has sent me a cease and desist notice, so I have taken the whole thing down. Months of reverse engineering, undone by one PDF.

I started this because I wanted to know things about my own scooter that nothing would tell me. Then other people found it, and it stopped being mine — over 200 of you were using it live, watching your batteries, your rides and your chargers on something built in evenings and on weekends. I loved every bit of building it for you. Genuinely. It is the most fun I have had making anything.

And there was so much still coming. Charging controls, an alert for when there is finally enough charge to leave on, a proper charging history, a real reliability picture for the Grid — half-written, in the pipeline, waiting their turn. None of it ships now, and I am gutted about that more than anything else.

It never paid for itself, and it was never meant to. Keeping the server alive cost me around S$2 every couple of days — call it S$30 a month, out of my own pocket — and the handful of you who subscribed covered part of that. That was the entire economy of this thing: your money and mine, together, keeping a dashboard alive for a couple of hundred riders. No ads, no investors, and nothing about you ever sold to anyone.

Thank you for the bug reports at midnight, the feature requests, and the riders who lent me their own scooters to test things I had no hardware for. This was only ever a community project, in the one way that counts: it existed because you used it.

Your data goes with it. Every Ather token, every ride and every battery reading is being erased as this server comes down — nothing of your scooter stays behind. And none of it should come as a surprise: the About page said from the start what this held, that it was unofficial, and that it could stop working at any time. You already knew everything.

Ride safe.

— Runal · u/runal_bandishti on Reddit