Comma Three Devkit

[faebi]

Dave Lee recently had an interesting interview with George Hotz about self-driving cars and the future of AI: https://youtu.be/q6iagfjs83U

[pmcollins]

awesome video, thank you.

btw if anyone’s wondering what they’re talking about regarding end-to-end, this article explains it:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/deep-learning-self-driving...

[johnkg]

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

[solarkraft]

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

[geoah]

Need to watch the presentation still but I’d be more interested in how many km/miles it has collectively driven.

[yewenjie]

AFAIK Comma.ai is the only open-source company in the self-driving cars space. It is very interesting that they are continuously launching consumer-products with a small team and in a highly competitive space where the other players are quite big.

[alpaca128]

They have a more focused approach that simplifies it a lot. Where others build whole self-driving cars Comma uses existing interfaces and sensors in the vehicle. That's far less complexity to worry about.

[stefan_]

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).

[kyle_martin1]

Not actually open source. The source code that’s available is a thin wrapper around a closed-source ML model. If George really cared about Open Source he would release the training architecture and training data.

[evanescent]

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.

[sjburt]

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, I think the DM is actually a little more lenient than it should be. In generally, you are basically as alert as if you are driving. The advantage is that you aren't spending mental energy keeping the car centered in the lane or maintaining a good following distance, or straining your arms holding onto a steering wheel. Long car trips are much more comfortable and less as a result.

It's not very useful on city streets or curvy mountain roads, the places where it shines are freeways and stop and go traffic -- the boring driving.

It has been quite reliable, most of the kinks have been worked out and they have enough users that there are not any serious bugs on the standard releases. I have reported minor bugs and had them fixed in a matter of days, which is always amazing for an OSS project. If you have an uncommon car there can be tuning issues from time to time. There is also a fairly strong user community on Discord that can help you troubleshoot things.

It works best on Toyotas and Hyundais, Honda and Subarus are a little worse, and the other manufacturers is really hit or miss--there may be individual models where someone got it working.

It is not a consumer product, you need to be somewhat capable of troubleshooting the occasional issue, reading documentation, dealing with occasional quirks etc.

[kyle_martin1]

I use my comma two everyday. Works great. Support from the company is non-existent.

I'm kind of pissed because I bought it in the last few months and now they've come out with another one. There should be a trade-in and upgrade program.

[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...

[pd0wm]

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).

[kelnos]

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.

[nanis]

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.

[solarkraft]

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.

[treelovinhippie]

For those new to the comma.ai strategy:

Autopilot is iOS. Openpilot is Android.

Far more devices running Android than iOS in the world. And unlike consumer tech, the average car on the road is over 12 years old.

So there's a long window of opportunity where we might see more people choose to upgrade their current vehicles to self-driving, versus those choosing to buy new vehicles with inbuilt self-driving hardware.

[kelnos]

I think a big barrier to adoption here is that your Android phone most likely won't kill you if it has a bad bug[0].

Comma almost certainly won't get widespread adoption until it has enough miles driven on it (at least a billion?) for people to have enough data to start talking about its safety record. So that means it'll be stuck in the realm of enthusiasts for quite a long time.

If it does prove itself, though, I agree with you that it could be a game-changer for people who have recent enough cars to be supported, but not have their own driver-assist systems. And that's probably a lot of cars, and a lot of people.

[0] Although, with the exploding batteries debacle...

[ipsum2]

> It has dual cam 360° vision

From what I can tell, it doesn't have 360 vision of your car, but only the front and back of the device.

[valgaze]

"The comma three devkit does not ship with any software. Once you have the device you will be able to install any software you choose at your own risk."

[bitwidget]

Makes sense, if they shipped with the software already preinstalled, it would mean that they open themselves up to liability and other legal issues. So they don't have it installed as it's pretty easy to download and install from their Github

[jalino23]

huge fan of the CEO. inspired me to use vim 7 months ago and it increased my productivity

[lostmsu]

In the one I saw he spent 5 minutes (of 30) figuring out a mistake caused by a simple typo, that a regular IDE would wiggle for him the second after he typed it in.

[solarkraft]

Same. His rap skills are hard to forget. https://youtu.be/9iUvuaChDEg

[mgraczyk]

Hi George, is this one finally doing stereo depth?