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Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

fluorite.game

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Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that for your phone to provide accurate routing, it needs data from the car. Preferably live updating data. Today this is done via an OBD Bluetooth adapter or via CarPlay/Android Auto APIs that allow the phone to get data from the car.

Funny, my phone can provide accurate routing data with out the car. What data from the car does the phone need to be able to accurately route? I'm at my desk no where near my car and it is working just fine

Current battery level and consumption, so that it can tell you whether you will make it to your destination with adequate charge left or insert charging stops where needed.

Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#312
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A gigabyte!? You shouldn’t need any dedicated RAM. A decent microcontroller should be able to handle transcoding the output from the camera to the display and provide infotainment software that talks to the CANbus or Ethernet. And the bare minimum is probably just a camera and a display. Even buffering a full HD frame would only require a few megabytes. Pretty sure the law doesn’t require an electron app running a VL…

I tried to think of a wording that wouldn't get this response, I guess I failed. Ram is generally bought in gigabytes, "1 or less" is as low as numbers go without getting overly detailed. So what microcontroller do you have in mind that can run a 1-2 megapixel screen on internal memory? I would have guessed that a separate ram chip would be cheaper.

https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI

But mostly it’s the fundamental problem space from an A/V perspective. You don’t need iPhone-grade image processing - you just need to convert the raw signal from the CMOS chip to some flavor of YUV or RGB, and get that over to the screen via whatever interface it exposes.

NTSC HD was designed to be compatible with pretty stateless one-way broadcast over the air. And that was a follow-on to analog encodings that were laid down based on timing of the scanning CRT gun from dividing the power line frequency in an era where 1GB of RAM would be sci-fi. We use 29.97 / 59.94 fps from shimming color signal into 30 fps B&W back when color TV was invented in the early-mid 1900s, that’s how tight this domain is.

Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your CPU's L4 cache is normally DRAM, and it's cheaper to shove some RAM into a microprocessor than to have a separate chip.

I simply refuse to believe the cost difference between a CPU with hundreds of megs of DRAM is cheap enough to be an appealing choice over the same chip with a gig of RAM. We're not talking about a disposable vape with 3kb of RAM, this is a car that needs to power a camera and sensors and satellite radio and matrix headlights or whatever. If it's got gigahertz of compute, there's no reason it's still got RAM sized for…

The original comment was complaining about backup cameras seemingly adding significant electronics requirements.

In practice, you’re not going to tie intimate knowledge of the matrix headlights into the infotainment system, that’s just bad engineering. At most it would know how to switch them on and off, maybe a few very granular settings like brightness or color or some kind of frequency adjustment, not worrying about every single LED, but I can’t imagine a budget car ever exposing all that to the end user. Even if you did, that would be some kind of legendarily bad implementation to require a gigabyte of RAM to manage dozens of LEDs. Like, is it launching a separate node instance exposing a separate HTTPS port for every LED at that point?

Ditto for the satellite radio. That can and probably is a separate module, and that’s more of a radio / AV domain piece of tech that’s going to operate in a world that historically hasn’t had the luxury of gigabytes of RAM.

Sensors - if this is a self-driving car with 3D LIDAR and 360-degree image sensors, the backup camera requirement is obviously utterly negligible.

Remember, we had TV for most of the 20th century, even before integrated circuits even existed, let alone computers and RAM. We didn’t magically lose the ability to send video around without the luxury of storing hundreds of frames’ worth of data.

Yeah, at some point it makes more sense to make or grab a chip with slightly more RAM so it has more market reach, but cars are manufactured at a scale where they actually are drivers of microcontroller technology. We are talking about a few dollars for a chip in a car being sold for thousands of dollars used, or tens of thousands of dollars new.

There is just no way that adding a backup camera is an existential issue for product lines.

Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#314
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A gigabyte!? You shouldn’t need any dedicated RAM. A decent microcontroller should be able to handle transcoding the output from the camera to the display and provide infotainment software that talks to the CANbus or Ethernet. And the bare minimum is probably just a camera and a display. Even buffering a full HD frame would only require a few megabytes. Pretty sure the law doesn’t require an electron app running a VL…

I just went on Amazon and a 1GB stick of DDR3 ram is about 30% cheaper than a 128mb stick of RAM. Why would any RAM company make tiny RAM chips when they can make standard-sized chips that work for every application that needs less?

I really feel like a lot of the people objecting in this thread are people who have just written web apps in Python whose closest experience with the audio-visual space is WebRTC.

Tech for cars is “standard-sized”. Not everything revolves around datacenters and tech, the car industry easily predates the computer industry and operates on a lot tighter margins and a lot stricter regulations.

So having a smaller, simpler chip that ultimately costs less physical resources at scale and is simpler to test is better when you’re planning on selling millions of units and you need to prove that it isn’t going to fail and kill somebody. Or, if it does fail and kill somebody, it’s simpler to analyze to figure out why that happened. You’ve also got to worry about failure rates for things like a separate RAM module not being seated properly at the factory and slipping out of the socket someday when the car is moving around.

Now - yes, modern cars have gotten more complex, and are more likely to run some software using Linux rather than an RTOS or asic. But the original complaint was that a backup camera adds non-negligible complexity / cost.

For a budget car where that would even make sense, that means you’re expecting to sell at high volume and basically nothing else requires electronics. So sourcing 1GB RAM chips and a motherboard that you can slot them in would be complete overkill and probably a regulatory nightmare, when you could just buy an off-the-shelf industrial-grade microcontroller package that gets fabbed en masse, dozens or hundreds of units to a single silicon wafer.

Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#315
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A gigabyte!? You shouldn’t need any dedicated RAM. A decent microcontroller should be able to handle transcoding the output from the camera to the display and provide infotainment software that talks to the CANbus or Ethernet. And the bare minimum is probably just a camera and a display. Even buffering a full HD frame would only require a few megabytes. Pretty sure the law doesn’t require an electron app running a VL…

Back in the mists of time, we used to do realtime video from camera to display with entirely analog components. Not that I'm eager to have a CRT in my dashboard, but live video from a local camera is a pretty low bar to clear.

Yeah, I cannot understand why people are thinking a gigabyte of RAM in this context save for their context being imagining what this would take with a python HTTPS server streaming video via WebRTC to an electron GUI running out of local docker containers or something. Because that ought to be enough memory for a hour of compressed video.

It’s like saying your family of four is going to take a vacation, so you might need to reserve an entire Hyatt for a week, rather than a single room in a Motel 6.

Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#316
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to think of a wording that wouldn't get this response, I guess I failed. Ram is generally bought in gigabytes, "1 or less" is as low as numbers go without getting overly detailed. So what microcontroller do you have in mind that can run a 1-2 megapixel screen on internal memory? I would have guessed that a separate ram chip would be cheaper.

https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI But mostly it’s the fundamental problem space from an A/V perspective. You don’t need iPhone-grade image processing - you just need to convert the raw signal from the CMOS chip to some flavor of YUV or RGB, and get that over to the screen via whatever interface it exposes. NTSC HD was designed to be compatible with pretty stateless one-way broadcast over the ai…

> https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI

That board has a DDR3 chip on it. Is there one with HDMI that doesn't?

> But mostly it’s the fundamental problem space from an A/V perspective. You don’t need iPhone-grade image processing - you just need to convert the raw signal from the CMOS chip to some flavor of YUV or RGB, and get that over to the screen via whatever interface it exposes.

> NTSC HD was designed to be compatible with pretty stateless one-way broadcast over the air. And that was a follow-on to analog encodings that were laid down based on timing of the scanning CRT gun from dividing the power line frequency in an era where 1GB of RAM would be sci-fi. We use 29.97 / 59.94 fps from shimming color signal into 30 fps B&W back when color TV was invented in the early-mid 1900s, that’s how tight this domain is.

If you're getting a signal that's already uncompressed TV-like then you probably don't need a processor at all. But I didn't want to assume you're getting that, running a multi-Gbps signal over a wire in a very hostile environment.

The more generic solution needs the ability to hold a couple frames in memory. Which probably means a ram chip. Please don't focus so hard on the way I rounded the number. The point was that it's a negligible number of dollars. And you can use a much smaller chip than a gigabyte, but that doesn't save a proportional amount of money and the conclusion is the same, negligible amount of dollars.

I guess I could have said "gigabit". Anything that got into specific numbers of megabytes would have been pointless detail. And it's megabytes minimum if there's a frame buffer.

Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#317

The combination of Flutter + Claude Code makes cross-platform app development really, really fast. I've been impressed with how well Clause handles prompts like, "This list should expand on the web, but not on iOS." I then ask it (Claude) to run both a web instance and an iOS simulator instance. Can usability test in-tandem. I recently (as in, last night) added WebSockets to my backend, push notifications to my front…

> push notifications to my frontend iOS > It all kinda just works. > Can usability test in-tandem. Man, people say this kind of thing, and I go… really? …because I use Claude code, and an iOS MCP server (1) and hot damn I would not describe the experience as “just works”. What MCP and model are you using to automate the testing on your device and do automated QA with to, eg. verify your native device notifications ar…

Claude set up my whole backend on AWS. That includes a load balancer, web server, email server, three application servers, and a bastion server to connect to their VPN.

It configured everything by writing an AWS Terraform file. Stored all secrets in AWS as well.

Everything I do is on the command line with Claude running in Visual Studio Code. I have a lot of MacOS X / Ubuntu Linux command line experience. Watching Claude work is like watching myself working. It blew my mind the first time it connected through the bastion to individual AWS instances to run scripts and check their logs.

So yeah, the same Claude Code instance that configured the backend is running inside a terminal in VS Code where I’m developing the frontend. Backend is Django/Python. Frontend is Flutter/Dart. Claude set up the WebSocket in Django/Gunicorn and the WebSocket in Flutter.

It also walked me through the generation of keys to configure push notifications on iOS. You have to know something about public/private key security, but that amounts to just generating the files in the right formats (PEM vs P12).

Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#318
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the mists of time, we used to do realtime video from camera to display with entirely analog components. Not that I'm eager to have a CRT in my dashboard, but live video from a local camera is a pretty low bar to clear.

Yeah, I cannot understand why people are thinking a gigabyte of RAM in this context save for their context being imagining what this would take with a python HTTPS server streaming video via WebRTC to an electron GUI running out of local docker containers or something. Because that ought to be enough memory for a hour of compressed video. It’s like saying your family of four is going to take a vacation, so you might…

> I cannot understand why people are thinking a gigabyte of RAM in this context save for their context being imagining what this would take with

Who's people? It isn't me, I was rounding to the nearest positive integer. And bastawhiz is arguing in the abstract about RAM prices so I don't see how they fit this complaint either.

> It’s like saying your family of four is going to take a vacation, so you might need to reserve an entire Hyatt for a week, rather than a single room in a Motel 6.

From my point of view, it's more like each room only holds one person so you can't just say "a room" (megabyte), and renting a whole hotel would only be 0.1% of the total vacation budget, so I simplify it and just say "rent a hotel" (gigabyte). It doesn't mean I think it's necessary, it means I'm pointing out how cheap it is and don't need to go deeper.

Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code. And therein lies the problem

Honestly I'm not so strongly opiniated now as I was a few weeks ago. I'm in a huge questioning phase about my work/craft/hobby. I've worked places where junior made bad code that was accepted because the QA tests were ok. I even had a situation in production where we had memory leaks because nobody tried to use it for more than 20 minutes when we knew that the app is used 24/7. We aim for 99% quality when no-one want…

I built a system that can hold 40,000 concurrent users with hardly 2 GiB of RAM, a bit of bandwidth (with a 300 Mbps connection it works great) using Capnproto and that I am scaling horizontally.

A server with 6 cores can hold at least 3 of these services. Now think of customers. How much you are going to save in operations? Loooooots! For backend efficiency and quality is still a critical metric, especially when operations are so cheap (tens of dollars per month).

Re: Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> push notifications to my frontend iOS > It all kinda just works. > Can usability test in-tandem. Man, people say this kind of thing, and I go… really? …because I use Claude code, and an iOS MCP server (1) and hot damn I would not describe the experience as “just works”. What MCP and model are you using to automate the testing on your device and do automated QA with to, eg. verify your native device notifications ar…

Claude set up my whole backend on AWS. That includes a load balancer, web server, email server, three application servers, and a bastion server to connect to their VPN. It configured everything by writing an AWS Terraform file. Stored all secrets in AWS as well. Everything I do is on the command line with Claude running in Visual Studio Code. I have a lot of MacOS X / Ubuntu Linux command line experience. Watching Cl…

? How does any of that let you do QA against the mobile app?

> Can usability test in-tandem

> It also walked me through the generation of keys to configure push notifications on iOS.

??? You’re manually doing the testing and setup and not using AI for this?

Im confused at to what part of this mobile work claude is doing that “just works” for you.

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