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| Which is more complex - car or an operating system? |
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| capacitor_explosion:
As far as im aware the modern car the software is +1-100 milion lines of code . Even on low-end to mid-end cars have 20+ ECUs working and comunicating at the same time. The number of ECUs is growing all the time: not only because of safety and emissions reduction but, lately, because of the need of the car to be "connected". But that comes with a cost more lines of code = more bugs and problems down the road . |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: JPortici on June 03, 2020, 06:11:41 am ---[OT] I also agree with you on modern cars - in part. I'm 100% happy with my current 2014 skoda octavia. Good engine, manual gear, KNOBS AND BUTTONS instead of a stupid touchscreen. It lacks LED lights -and no approved conversion kit - :( and i kind of wish i had an android auto radio but nog going to spend 2k for that The best balance in electronics in cars was around 2015 IMHO. The only new car i would get today would be (again) a Fiat, Alfa or a Jeep, they are the only ones i still feel like i am the one who's driving. In many other brands i find the elecronics to be too intrusive. And fiat's is the best infotainment IMHO Maybe i'll change the idea when the all touchscreen fad will go away.. no more than four years i think?[/OT] --- End quote --- My friend has a Skoda Octavia, 2009 I think, TDI engine, he's been pretty happy with it. In recent years though he's had an issue where it will crank but won't start after it's been driven. For example it'll fire up just fine at home, then he drives to the store to buy groceries and it won't start. I think mid 90s-early 2000's was kind of the golden era in many ways. Cars by then had all the creature comforts I care about but hadn't started to get bloated and they still largely had real buttons and switches. They had started to transition from nice clean lines to weird rounded bubbly shapes both inside and out though and I still much prefer straight lines, clean angles and a more industrial design. My favorite examples are aircraft, they don't follow silly styling fads and are almost purely form over function. The cockpit in a modern airliner looks a lot like the cockpit in a 1950s airliner aside from analog gauges being replaced by "glass cockpit" digital representations. The layout and overall design are mature, the problem was solved decades ago and they don't keep making arbitrary changes just to make it look new. |
| Fredderic:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on June 03, 2020, 02:39:47 pm ---I've always found this one "argument" (very popular silly nitpick about the Windows Start button for like ever) completely off. The Start "button" in Windows gave access to the "Start" menu - from which you could pretty much control the whole computer, including switching it off. It's a rather consistent approach. The "start" button in Windows was never meant to "start" the computer itself anyway (how could it), but to act as a "starting point" for most tasks. Anyway. --- End quote --- The start button in Windows for shutting off the computer, is a little different though. It's a little more obvious in Linux, where you shut down the computer by running the "shutdown" command (or one of it's variants) on a commandline (and I'm pretty certain the GUIs still do it by invoking those same commands — Linux likes that, because it lets you substitute a different command/system/whatever to suit your needs). But Windows is essentially the same. You are, in fact, "starting" the process that orchestrates the system shutdown on your behalf. Also, I'm pretty sure I recall way back when the Windows start button was first introduced, it was specifically being presented as the "starting point" for doing things with your system. But yeah, in pretty much all the major OS's, you are quite literally starting the shutting down of the system. I'm not sure the same can really be said for cars… Yet. Although computer-on-wheels models like Tesla, quite possibly… Assuming they do still even actually shut off at all… "Starting the engine" for an all electric vehicle, seems like a dubious proposition to begin with. |
| NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: james_s on June 03, 2020, 05:17:53 am --- --- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on June 03, 2020, 04:21:11 am ---CVT is a great example. They are conceptually extremely simple. Four cones and a belt. With infinite gear ratios they are absolutely ideal for matching the power band of an engine to current driving conditions. At least that is the theory. The devil is in the details, and the fact that this perfect solution is relatively rarely used in production vehicles indicates that there is some real "complexity" to implementation. An analogy for the purely electronic among us is a buck configuration switching power supply. An electronic switch. It is always either on or off so no power is dissipated in the switch. And then a simple capacitor to smooth the output. What could be simpler? But when it becomes time to actually implement one and get close to that theoretically perfect concept there are a myriad of details to get right. --- End quote --- CVTs are shit, my friend has one in some kinds of strange looking thing, Nissan I think. It failed at around 70k miles and cost a fortune to fix. She's not alone either, the forums are full of people having problems with them. Then there is the driving experience, they either feel just plain weird and disconcerting, and sound like something is very wrong when they are working properly, or the computer has been programmed to mimic the discrete shifts like a conventional transmission. It's one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but in practice it is garbage, at least it has been in the 3 or 4 cars I've driven that had one. --- End quote --- Toyota has a simpler, more reliable design for a CVT based around a planetary gearset and two motors. The complexity is in the electronics - looking at a control board for one of those, there are two ASICs with a 4MB SPI ROM next to one of them, two motor control ADCs, and the remainder of the board are various logic power supplies and CAN bus transceivers. Funny thing is, I bought the whole assembly for cheap so I could convert the motor inverters into a solar inverter, which involves replacing the control board with a FPGA. I wouldn't be surprised if there's enough flexibility built into the ASICs to theoretically allow them to be reprogrammed to do exactly what I want, but the intentional lack of documentation would make that a lot more difficult than just putting in a FPGA. |
| Neilm:
I drive a Tesla, so I can't tell the difference between the two |
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