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Comma Three Devkit

comma.ai

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Re: Comma Three Devkit

#31

Post by birken »

sjburt wrote: post #15
evanescent wrote: post #7

Has anyone here tried using one of these? On the surface they seem to be relatively reliable and safe. I am tempted to get try one out since their driver cam gives me confidence that I won't become complacent while using one of these self-driving systems.

I have a Comma Two and have driven maybe 4000 miles on it around the SF Bay area. It is somewhat limited in that they can only steer as hard as the car's lanekeeping system is willing to steer. The driver monitoring helps although I am middle aged and pretty careful anyway so it's only actually beeped at me on a handful of occasions. Honestly, it is not the type of device where you want to take your eyes off the road…

Installation is not consumer friendly (though I'm sure any auto shop would happily install it), but functionality certainly is. My wife who is not particularly tech savvy has no problem using Comma.

I have a car that isn't even the best for Comma because of steering limits (Honda CRV), and on road trips I've been able to not touch the steering wheel or accelerator/brake for 30+ minutes on open stretches of the 101. You'd think it doesn't matter all that much, but it saves so much energy. A 4 hour drive feels like a 1 hour drive. Monitoring that the car is driving sensibly uses far less energy than actually driving.

And as you say, in bumper to bumper traffic it is just amazing. I was in a 2.5 (!) hour backup between LA and San Diego a few weeks ago and Comma did 99% of the driving. And the only times I had to take over were when other frustrated drivers were doing insane things out of boredom or anger that endangered me. Computers don't get frustrated or angry! The aggravation saved on that one trip paid for the cost.

Re: Comma Three Devkit

#32

Post by birken »

varelse wrote: post #30
birken wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comma is far and away the best version of "automatic cruise control" that exists in any consumer car. If you think Comma is hacky then wait until you see Tesla's version, which costs $10k and only works on one brand of car! The stock "automatic cruise control" is most cars is far worse and far more dangerous than Comma, and those companies aren't getting taken down by lawsuits. At the end of the day, the driver is re…

Um... Have you driven a Mach E yet? No interest in its upcoming FSD, but the adaptive cruise control and lane assistance is wonderfully conservative and useful.

I've only driven my car, but Consumer Reports tested a bunch of cars and rated Comma the best [1]. Maybe another car since then is better, but of course Comma is always getting updated and you just download the new version to your device when it comes out.

1: https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...

Re: Comma Three Devkit

#33

Post by woodruffw »

I'm not anywhere near a specialist when it comes to car software, CAN, or self-driving, but I'm concerned by some of the code that (appears to) control some of the supported cars: I pulled up a random file[1], and it's littered with undocumented bytestrings that are apparently sent over the CAN bus, as magic constants (with accompanying comments that mention "aggressive" and "laggy" behavior).

I have no insight into any of the proprietary work in this space, so I have no idea whether this is unique or commonplace. But it certainly isn't confidence inspiring, particularly as a cyclist.

[1]: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/de0ce142ae51cf9c85...

Re: Comma Three Devkit

#34

Post by PhasmaFelis »

birken wrote: post #29
stefan_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not in any shape or form compete in the self-driving cars space; the thing doesn't have a rear camera! This is basically the "rsync as Dropbox" approach to augmenting your car with a hacky version of automatic cruise control, with a bonus lawsuit should you ever be in a crash significant enough to warrant the attention (think paralysis).

Comma is far and away the best version of "automatic cruise control" that exists in any consumer car. If you think Comma is hacky then wait until you see Tesla's version, which costs $10k and only works on one brand of car! The stock "automatic cruise control" is most cars is far worse and far more dangerous than Comma, and those companies aren't getting taken down by lawsuits. At the end of the day, the driver is re…

> only works on one brand of car!

Is that a downside? Anyone who's ever struggled with hardware driver problems knows that the more hardware configurations your software (notionally) supports, the more likely you are to have show-stopping bugs.

In a home PC, some reliability is arguably a fair trade-off for versatility. Not in a car.

Re: Comma Three Devkit

#35

Post by pd0wm »

woodruffw wrote: post #33

I'm not anywhere near a specialist when it comes to car software, CAN, or self-driving, but I'm concerned by some of the code that (appears to) control some of the supported cars: I pulled up a random file[1], and it's littered with undocumented bytestrings that are apparently sent over the CAN bus, as magic constants (with accompanying comments that mention "aggressive" and "laggy" behavior). I have no insight into…

The file you referenced is related to Ford, which is not a supported car/brand. The code for Ford is provided as a reference and is forced into “read-only” both by openpilot and panda (the bridge between openpilot and the car).

Re: Comma Three Devkit

#36

Post by kelnos »

woodruffw wrote: post #33

I'm not anywhere near a specialist when it comes to car software, CAN, or self-driving, but I'm concerned by some of the code that (appears to) control some of the supported cars: I pulled up a random file[1], and it's littered with undocumented bytestrings that are apparently sent over the CAN bus, as magic constants (with accompanying comments that mention "aggressive" and "laggy" behavior). I have no insight into…

On one hand I agree with you wholeheartedly (I also think python is a weird language choice for something that probably has some hard real-time requirements), but also consider that stuff like that may very well be present in the code bases of the closed-source commercial solutions, but unless someone who has worked on one of them speaks up, we'll never know.

Re: Comma Three Devkit

#37

Post by solarkraft »

woodruffw wrote: post #33

I'm not anywhere near a specialist when it comes to car software, CAN, or self-driving, but I'm concerned by some of the code that (appears to) control some of the supported cars: I pulled up a random file[1], and it's littered with undocumented bytestrings that are apparently sent over the CAN bus, as magic constants (with accompanying comments that mention "aggressive" and "laggy" behavior). I have no insight into…

There’s some messing around involved in building the interfaces to the cars. Comma’s excuse for why you shouldn’t be concerned is that both Open Pilot and the cars themselves have limits against erratic movements.

Re: Comma Three Devkit

#38

Post by solarkraft »

johnkg wrote: post #3

Comma claimed today: $8.1M raised, $9M revenue, 5000+ comma twos sold, 3500+ active users. Pretty cool for a open source company.

“Open source” is a difficult term regarding machine learning companies. Their sauce is the model and not much about that is open.

Re: Comma Three Devkit

#39

Post by kelnos »

birken wrote: post #29
stefan_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not in any shape or form compete in the self-driving cars space; the thing doesn't have a rear camera! This is basically the "rsync as Dropbox" approach to augmenting your car with a hacky version of automatic cruise control, with a bonus lawsuit should you ever be in a crash significant enough to warrant the attention (think paralysis).

Comma is far and away the best version of "automatic cruise control" that exists in any consumer car. If you think Comma is hacky then wait until you see Tesla's version, which costs $10k and only works on one brand of car! The stock "automatic cruise control" is most cars is far worse and far more dangerous than Comma, and those companies aren't getting taken down by lawsuits. At the end of the day, the driver is re…

> If you think Comma is hacky then wait until you see Tesla's version, which costs $10k and only works on one brand of car!

What does the cost and number of supported vehicles have to do with whether or not the software is hacky? (Hint: nothing; it has nothing to do with it.)

> The stock "automatic cruise control" is most cars is far worse and far more dangerous than Comma

That's a pretty extraordinary claim to make without presenting any evidence.

> one that undoubtedly makes driving safer for themselves and other vehicles on the road.

Ditto.

The front page of the Comma website claims "millions" of miles have been driven using it; given that in the US there's about 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven, I don't think we have anywhere near enough data to make any claims about Comma's safety. It may actually be safer, but I don't think we have a way to know that yet.

And also, given that Comma supports several different vehicles, I suspect that we'll have to consider its safety record on a per-make (and in some cases possibly per-model) basis, not on the system as a whole, in order to compare apples to apples.

Re: Comma Three Devkit

#40

Post by nanis »

woodruffw wrote: post #33

I'm not anywhere near a specialist when it comes to car software, CAN, or self-driving, but I'm concerned by some of the code that (appears to) control some of the supported cars: I pulled up a random file[1], and it's littered with undocumented bytestrings that are apparently sent over the CAN bus, as magic constants (with accompanying comments that mention "aggressive" and "laggy" behavior). I have no insight into…

Ouch. The method is called `update` and it is littered with stuff like:

   if (frame % 10) == 0:

      can_sends.append(make_can_msg(1648, b'\x00\x00\x00\x40\x00\x00\x50\x00', 1))
      can_sends.append(make_can_msg(1649, b'\x10\x10\xf1\x70\x04\x00\x00\x00', 1))

      ...
I know the identifiers etc are probably hard to catalog, but that is all the more reason to give things symbolic names and maybe even avoid having to specify those IDs repeatedly.
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