Teardown: The BMW / Harman IDC23H Infotainment Unit (B423)
hakstuff.net
hakstuff.net
I suppose even driving 20kmh should trigger the "door open!" alarm.
We need a team of very good sw developers.
Maybe we can have 20% of the team be cheap "developers", people that have no inclination towards sw development to do the boring stuff.
Maybe 20% of real developers is enough in a team. The rest will learn from them.
Let's have 100% cheap developers, the project only needs changes.
We can get even cheaper developers, come to us with no prior experience and in 3 months we will teach you what you need to know.
Our projects are delayed due to covid.
Oh no, the Chinese!
I don't need 120hz Apple-like design, but it's crazy how they can't even keep a basic 30fps UI running smooth. And they still try to throw in more and more bad running animations.
Probably because an important message passed by on the CAN-bus and that got a bit more priority from the CPU than the GUI
In fact I wager the OPPOSITE happened -- that they hired or outsourced software to people who have "web technology experience" and the UI and graphics architecture is a mishmash software stacks hastily thrown together (read: not architected).
Jaguar has a similar issue with the I-PACE where the HVAC system couldn't keep up with the knobs and would lag. A real embedded engineer who worked on real-time systems would know how to properly handle a quadrature encoded knob and NOT lag. A web-technology-first person who slapped something together using nodejs and/or Python would likely not know.
Compared with UIs made by Microsoft, Google or Apple which also "have no clue how to make a modern functioning UI".
At least those "embedded software engineers that have been in the automotive sector for 40 years" don't need 16 GB of RAM for a chat programm
It's core to usability at this point, though. They should make the effort.
Both my BMWs (one each of the last two generations of iDrive) do not in any noticeable capacity, nor did my 2009 one with what was then known as "professional" navigation.
> company contracts offshore agency
> devs costs drop by 20-40%
> offshore agency grabs any warm body off the street, JS-adjacent experience and minimum English is only requirement
> keeps 40% of the money
> "how many story points for the 360° camera React component, guys?"
I understand that's really lame but... who the heck gives a flying f--k about framerate in a car?
Are we talking about videos lagging for people sitting at the back (like kids)?
To handle the case where the customer would prefer not to think about interfacing their phone or tablet to their car, a branded compatible tablet should be a dealer option, or at least the tablet-like part of infotainment should be replaceable.
I wonder if the law specified a minimum display size and resolution, otherwise a car company could sell a car with an Apple-watch-sized display to save costs. I imagine selling a car where the display depends on the user's phone and complying with these laws will be virtually impossible.
I can't find a picture right now (man, internet search sucks nowadays), but e.g. lower trims of Kia Optima had it.
So while I'm fine with having to connect my phone to my car to get useful functionality, I'd like the car to provide something, too. I don't need it to be "smart" in any way, just a big, well-placed dumb screen that displays whatever the phone sends over.
This is already what I do when I drive a car, so I couldn't care less about whatever infotainment system is provided by the car. The only thing I use, because my phone isn't always practical for that, is the radio (as in listening to actual radio broadcasts).
Me too. But Google said: No. Yes, i tried the cr*p named Android Auto. No, it doesn't work.
(Maybe it's one of those that supports split outputs for multiple screens for all passenger positions? - i.e. kids in the back? That might be a bit more understandable.)