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The big automotive semiconductor problem

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Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#91

Post by linksnapzz »

brewtide wrote: post #82
sandworm101 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a difference with automotive/aviation products. They will all be in sealed containers and then the actual circuitry will all be covered in plastic. There shouldn't be any exposed metal that could possibly short, even if immersed in water. Pouring buckets of water on a running engine (ie a gap in the hood closure on a rainy day) or even into the passenger compartment (ie sunroof left open) shouldn't do much of…

Just as an example, a BY Audi has it's TCM (transmission) module under the us passengers side floor carpeting. It is in 'a box", but the box is in no way sealed. The metal box that is the TCM as a whole is made of metal, and maybe attempted to be sealed a bite but isn't sealed. B6 Audis have a design problem with their sunroof drains. When they clog up, unknown to you, the water will pool in passengers footwell area.…

B6 Audis have a design problem with their sunroof drains. When they clog up, unknown to you, the water will pool in passengers footwell area. It takes a while to notice this as a person, as there is 4-6" of foam padding between the metal floor of the car, and where you rest your feet . The TCM lives between these layers, and eventually, in the lake that will form, submerging your TCM -- leaving you with yet another reason to hate your Audi.

This is early 2000's. Late 200 a8 models had I believe 30+ different "computers" living in the same over metal under foam situation.*

I now have secondhand PTSD from reading this, and thinking about the Audi owners who have found out the hard way.

Dead leaves caught in your sunroof can make your transmission flake out. I'm sure the owner's manual, on page 935, instructs you to ream out the drains with a pipe-cleaner every 5,000km so that your car can shift properly. The only word I can think of for this is..."perverted".

Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#92

Post by chmod600 »

megablast wrote: post #81
chmod600 wrote: post #12

What devices are left that are fairly normal (that normal people might interact with in a given week), mechanical or electromechanical, have at least modest complexity, and have no microchips? Locks? Guns? What else? EDIT: perhaps an extra requirement that it's fairly durable, i.e. easily lasts ten years of normal use. EDIT2: maybe it should also fit the requirement that it's a current model in production and that yo…

Bicycles. The greatest form Of transport ever created.

Good one.

After reading this thread my list is:

* Toilets

* Bicycles

* Water heaters

* Locks

* Guns

The rest seem either a little too specialized, simple, or already in the process of being replaced by things with microchips.

A few of these may be replaced as well (locks?), but it's not quite happening yet.

Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#93

Post by dclowd9901 »

unregistereddev wrote: post #69
dclowd9901 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a bit like BMW’s VANOS or Honda’s Vtec. Variable cam timing is super cool tech and a huge reason newer cars are so much faster than old cars.

If described correctly, it is a different concept. Variable cam timing in the context of VANOS / Vtec / VVT refers to variable timing on the camshaft that controls valves. This sounds different, and I think it refers to mechanical fuel injection. Several automakers experimented with mechanical fuel injection in the 80's and early 90's, but I think the concept died pretty quickly. It was rather complex, failure prone,…

Oh interesting. The way I read it it sounded like it was manipulating the cams. I have heard of mechanical fuel injection — pretty cool stuff but yeah very finicky.

Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#94

Post by hansvm »

brewtide wrote: post #82
sandworm101 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a difference with automotive/aviation products. They will all be in sealed containers and then the actual circuitry will all be covered in plastic. There shouldn't be any exposed metal that could possibly short, even if immersed in water. Pouring buckets of water on a running engine (ie a gap in the hood closure on a rainy day) or even into the passenger compartment (ie sunroof left open) shouldn't do much of…

Just as an example, a BY Audi has it's TCM (transmission) module under the us passengers side floor carpeting. It is in 'a box", but the box is in no way sealed. The metal box that is the TCM as a whole is made of metal, and maybe attempted to be sealed a bite but isn't sealed. B6 Audis have a design problem with their sunroof drains. When they clog up, unknown to you, the water will pool in passengers footwell area.…

It only took one early 2000s Audi for me to swear off German cars for the foreseeable future. I don't know that their questionable design choices are applicable to the rest of the industry's chip practices.

Story time:

Around that time they saved a few bucks by switching the thermostat housing from metal to plastic and not changing the design at all so that it could be a drop-in replacement. With that distinct lack of engineering effort, they were prone to splitting at corner-induced stress lines in the plastic.

In an ordinary car this wouldn't be an issue; thermostats fail regularly, so their housings are readily accessible -- kind of like how most cars make changing the oil filter a manageable task. In an Audi however, the process is to take the front half of the car off to expose the engine, take the front half of the engine off, and then replace the now easily spotted housing.

So anyway, I don't know of a better place for the thermostat housing to split in half (leaking coolant out faster than you can pour it in) than the middle of fucking nowhere WY. By this time mobile phones were pretty common, but I swear to God they were sharing a single 1Mbps connection across ten counties; only about every third Google search would succeed without timing out, and as a precursor to learning how to take apart my car it was quite literally faster to code up a crude strip-the-garbage proxy (paginating compressed text and nothing else to send back) and deploy that to a home server than it was to try to surf the modern web over at best a 1k connection.

In retrospect the coding wasn't necessary since speeds increased to something manageable in the wee hours of the morning when everyone else was asleep and since it was absolutely not a 1-day job, but it was a bit of a fun experience anyway.

Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#95

Post by froh »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #72
froh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you happen to have pointers evidencing this handy? IS this also true for Dragon?

It is, see https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/12/27/dont-push-that-button-...

Thanks! I still hope to learn how they deal with infamous "bi directional requirements Tracing" and similar bureaucracies in the name of dependability. How do they evidence engineering scrutiny, how do the embed it into their processes in such a way that they _evidence_ scrutiny and deliberate engineering _without_ massive paper safety tigers, _without_ tons of slow bureaucracy?

Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#96

Post by bayindirh »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #86
bayindirh wrote: post #2

From the article: > Mobile phone SOCs integrate a substantial amount of function right onto the chip. Why hasn’t that been the case for the car? Because your mobile phone SoC is not certified for -20/+80 degrees Celsius, copious amount of vibration, error-free operation on many environments (incl. inputs with wrong voltages, shorts, etc.), and have a lifetime of 10+ years with the same performance characteristics. Yo…

> Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS. Well, it takes some parameters, goes into a lookup table and decides how much timing to retard, or fuel to give, and probably has a o2 sensor, checks knocking, etc. All done on pretty barebones 80's tech.

You're right on the tables part, but these are the words of the guy who worked on BMW for 14 years, who's on the video.

And, as a person who's doing simulation coding, I tend to behave to him about that.

The relevant part starts here: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scand...

Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#97

Post by ptsneves »

sandworm101 wrote: post #55
ptsneves wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In low temperatures you start having issues with moisture saturating the air. Things get wet out of nowhere. There are also electrolytic capacitors which are water based so these need to be ruled out as well. Given air has at any given time a lot of water and water goes through a phase change at sub zero i find the comparison quite invalid.

That's a difference with automotive/aviation products. They will all be in sealed containers and then the actual circuitry will all be covered in plastic. There shouldn't be any exposed metal that could possibly short, even if immersed in water. Pouring buckets of water on a running engine (ie a gap in the hood closure on a rainy day) or even into the passenger compartment (ie sunroof left open) shouldn't do much of…

By sealed you mean enclosed but not air tight right? Air tight sealing would require a pressure vessel for electronics which i never saw both on airplanes nor on cars.

The plastic coating though, I have seen. Such coating completely changes the thermals of the electronics making the OPs claims that a home GPU could just be strapped into a car very unlikely.

Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#98

Post by pas »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #80
pas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still mesmerized by microwave ovens. Sure, all of them now come with a chip, but that part is guaranteed 100% shit (I mean who the fuck designs these unergonomic monsters anyway!?) But the magnetron in them is complex, has to be machined to a high precision, yet they are a pretty old piece of completely analog technology.

Regarding microwave oven ergonomics, the best one I've seen doesn't have old-school dials, but a touch-sensitive slider bar. You may think this is bad, but it works very, very well. The front of the microwave has the time display, the time slider bar, and two buttons: stop/cancel and start/+30sec. Open the door and there are a few auto cook options and power level options. There is no number keypad at all; the slider…

Oh, and it actually looks slick/sleek :)

Recently I interacted with a brand new but old-schoolish one (dials and all), which was only openable by pushing a big analog button (which required a surprising amount of force). And this design seems common despite the totally idiotic UX of pushing a button that slightly opens the door, so then you have to open the door by hand, instead of putting a fucking handle on the door so it could be one move. (Probably because it's that much cheaper to have a door without a handle.)

Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#99

Post by pas »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #88
pas wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The old practices are just not good enough. True, but also think about the path dependence of the old companies. They have withered a lot of ups and downs, they are not the innovators, they are the very slow incrementalists that despite this release a new boring model every few years dressed up as the new best thing ever. (If you have seen a car from one manufacturer you have seen them all from them for the past de…

it's really fantastic though, for parts availability and reliability. People don't remember how absolute shit any pre-80's vehicle is. Like, shit tier reliability from carbs, tune ups, constant work. 100k? that car is dead and done! Now the average vehicle age has been climbing and climbing. The best part is that 2005 brake caliper is probably just a slightly more refined version from the 90's

Yes, exactly, no questions there :) I remember here in the 90s (barely post-USSR Hungary) going anywhere with a typical car was almost like a choose your own adventure, where adventure meant something will randomly go wrong, and if you are lucky you have spare parts with you, or maybe you can simply find a workaround (for example when the cooling system loses all the water because the radiator suddenly bursts means you could still make progress, of course slow and stopping if the engine gets too hot). And in the early 90s nobody had mobile phones, so it involved a bit of hitchhiking to the nearest phone too!

Re: The big automotive semiconductor problem

#100

Post by bayindirh »

rasz wrote: post #84
bayindirh wrote: post #2

From the article: > Mobile phone SOCs integrate a substantial amount of function right onto the chip. Why hasn’t that been the case for the car? Because your mobile phone SoC is not certified for -20/+80 degrees Celsius, copious amount of vibration, error-free operation on many environments (incl. inputs with wrong voltages, shorts, etc.), and have a lifetime of 10+ years with the same performance characteristics. Yo…

>Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS. Lets not exaggerate :) ECU reads a bunch of sensors, does some mild compute, uses that to do a table lookup, interpolates and slaps the result into actuators. 8bit 10MHz is enough to accomplish this task.

These are not my words. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875680
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