As we continue to make our way towards preparing Brainiac orders to ship, we’re now starting to build relationships with distributors and dealers who wish to carry the Brainiac product line.  Our goal is to have a great network of dealers ready to go as soon as we have units leaving the manufacturing plant 🙂

While the installation of Brainiac is similar to a standard car stereo installation, and many people have a DIY spirit, it’s always good to have fantastic local product support, inventory availability and installation services for any trouble shooting or help you may need.

We’re now ready to formally talk with dealers and regional distributors about our programs and invite those who are interested to reach out to us for more details on how to get started!

One of the great things about Brainiac is that it can provide an integration backbone for your vehicle.  What we mean by that is that you’re able to use Brainiac as a means to automate other electronic accessories installed in your car.

One such accessory is the 86Nanny from Beastronix Racing.  The 86 Platform (FR-S/BRZ/GT86) is built with the ability to disable Traction Control/Vehicle Stability Control (VSC). As most motorsport enthusiasts know, the system has limitations in place on this function for safety purposes and won’t completely disable traction control/VSC.

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We’ve been absolutely floored by the amount of support and feedback that we’ve been receiving from the community for Brainiac and what we’re trying to accomplish at Workshop 12.  The level of engagement and honest feedback means so much to us!  To build the best possible product, we need to know exactly what you like about Brainiac and also what you hope for it to become!

This invaluable feedback means so much to us that we wanted to find a way to give something back to those who follow us.  We ran a promotion for our very early supporters who received a 10% discount on their first order by signing up for our newsletter before October 31st, 2015.  Since then the news of Brainiac has spread and we’ve gained a lot of new followers who are also providing great feedback and insight, so we sat down and thought of how we could say thank-you to our ever growing list of supporters.

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We’re now into January and well into our initial preorder campaign.  It’s extremely exciting to see the support we’re getting for Brainiac shown both in the number of preorders as well as support from the car community!  Brainiac units on preorder will be the first to be delivered to customers, so we encourage everyone to place their preorder to ensure their spot in line.

Our primary focus is on delivering preorder units with quality and as quickly as possible.  As we hit July and our focus turns to shipping preordered units to customers, we’ll be working on some contingencies to not have this initial volume delay orders that come in after the end of June.

So if you’re excited about getting your Brainiac unit as soon as possible, we encourage you to sign up for the preorder to be one of the first units shipped.  We’ve setup what we believe to be a no-risk system that does not charge your credit card until your Brainiac unit ships to you.  You’re also able to cancel your order at any time up until your Brainiac unit ships.

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We’ve received a tremendous amount of early feedback from our preorder campaign!  What we’ve heard loud and clear from most of our supporters is that our approach of using Kickstarter does not meet your needs for preorder services.

There have been a variety of very valid points raised and we want to let you know that we’ve been listening.  Since receiving this overwhelming amount of feedback we’ve been working around the clock to provide a more suitable solution for our customers.  We’ve now integrated preorder capability right into our website.

This new capability will allow you to place preorders for both Brainiac and its accessories; and your credit card will not be charged until your order ships!  This allows you to manage or modify your order(s) all the way up until your products are heading out the door to you. Read More

***************** UPDATE *****************
We have changed our preorder system.  Details can be found here
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We are extremely excited to announce that preorders for Brainiac and its automation accessories are now open!  It’s been about a year from when we first started experimenting with the thoughts of taking what we learned from automating the BatBerry and applying the technology in a more general fashion.  We want everyone to experience what it’s like to have a connected car.

It has been a lot of hard work to transform Brainiac from an idea into a great product that has a variety of installation options to meet the needs of the many different makes, models and generations of vehicles on the road today.  The fun part is that we’re just getting started and have plans to bring our 10.1″ large screen experience to many more vehicles.  I mean let’s face it, that big screen looks really cool when installed in your dashboard!  Read More

Over the last while we’ve been showing bits and pieces of new Brainiac functionality via different social media updates and are now ready to share some of those updates in our Brainiac emulator!

We’ve been busy testing our OBDII data integration for checking system statuses, clearing codes and also pulling system data.  We’ve updated the emulator to give you a taste of what’s to come with our new status and gauges app.

Again, the emulator is just a preview of what’s coming with a proper install of Brainiac.  It’s a bit difficult to show the full functionality without actually installing the unit into a vehicle, so we’ve been adding in more emulated data to give you a better feel. Read More

The good folks at Don Valley North Toyota/Scion were kind enough to allow us to come back after our initial 3D scanning to perform our first test fitting session for the Scion FR-S/Subaru BRZ Brainiac snap-in kit.   The plastics we used were not the final designs, but allowed us to get a better feel for overall fit and finish as well as which areas require tweaking.

We were quite happy with how things went, and of course found a few areas that we need to tweak to ensure an OEM quality fit.  It also gave us an opportunity to take some nice “glamour shots” of Brainiac installed and record some footage for our upcoming Kickstarter campaign video for when we open up preorders. Read More

Lately we’ve been paying a lot of attention to the initial vehicle line-up of our 10.1″ Brainiac snap-in kits, but we haven’t forgotten about our 7″ double-din unit 🙂

We’ve had a lot of requests from our early supporters for the 7″ unit and they are just as excited to see the double-din unit make its way into production as the larger 10.1″ units.  We know that there are a bazillion different makes, models and generations of vehicles out there and we want to make sure we have an offering for everyone.

Both the 7″ double-din unit and the 10.1″ Retrofit Kit provide the same great functionality as our snap-in kits with the ability to be installed in pretty much any vehicle.  All three of our installation options including the 10.1″ snap-in kits, 10.1″ Retrofit kits and 7″ double-din units will be available for preorder at the same time. Read More

One of the challenges with the Scion FR-S and Subaru BRZ is finding room to re-locate a physical hazard button.  With the existing OEM design of the dashboard the hazard button is smack-dab in the middle of the dashboard in the area that we replace with our 10.1″ screen.  After many discussions with potential FR-S/BRZ customers on social media and in the forums, we settled on moving the button to the lower pocket area and replacing the existing AUX-in port.

We’ve been posting up different sketches along the way of different hazard button locations, but since we’ve settled on the lower pocket location it was time to get to work on different potential designs.  What makes this a little trickier is that there are two different lower pockets depending on the options you have with this car.  Some have a push-to-start button, and others simply have a pocket. Read More

***************** UPDATE *****************
We have changed our preorder system.  Details can be found here
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We’re almost there…. Almost ready to open up preorders for Brainiac!  We’re in the final edits of our promotional video and website content so we can now start to share more details about the preorder process with you before we go live.  We also want to share more information about the 10% discount that many of our early supporters qualified for by signing up for the Workshop 12 newsletter before the end of day October 31st, 2015.

We’ll be launching our preorders using services from Kickstarter to create a 30 day campaign to raise the funds necessary to move into to the manufacturing phase.  The way that Kickstarter works is that it allows you to pledge an amount with your credit card towards Brainiac in exchange for rewards.  In our case the rewards will be Brainiac units and accessories.   Each reward will be outlined on the preorder website allowing you to pick one or more rewards. Read More

As the news of Brainiac spreads we’ve received many requests to bring the 10.1″ snap-in kit to a variety of different dashboards.  The vehicles that are requested range all the way from older vehicles to brand new ones rolling out of the dealership.  We even receive many requests from those who are performing resto-mods or full on custom car builds.

We realize that there are only so many hours in the day to add new vehicles into our 10.1″ snap-in kit product line up.  Also, there are so many different years, makes and models on the road today making it difficult to cover everyone.  So as we continue to create more Brainiac snap-in installation kits, we are also making a Retrofit Kit available.

The Brainiac Retrofit Kit will include the same components as the 10.1″ snap-in kit (screen, buttons, computing unit, OBDII cable, wiring harness), but instead of plastics built specifically for a target vehicle, it will include a universal screen cradle that will allow you to build your own custom installation (Climate controls not included).  The screen can be positioned in either landscape or portrait orientation to best suit your dashboard.

While we know this route isn’t for the faint of heart, the ability to use off-the-shelf 3D modeling tools, 3D printing and other traditional means of fabrication allow you to create our own integrated dashboard.

The Retrofit Kit will be priced at $999 USD as a midpoint between the 7″ double-din unit and a 10.1″ snap-in kit.  You’ve asked for it, we’ve listened and are making it happen.  Now it’s up to you.  Create a great custom installation and share it with us so that we can show the rest of the world your innovative work

Don’t worry, we’ll be adding as many vehicles to our 10.1″ snap-in kit line up as possible, we’re just enabling others to do so as well 🙂