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Cringely, Cars, and Networks
Boiled Frog writes: "Cringely's latest article talks about Telematics, the art of putting computers in cars. However, the more interesting part is near the end where he talks about mesh networks where every car would have a router in it. I could see this extending digital cell service and mobile network connectivity far into rural areas."
Well, there are some, but they're usually on blocks in the front yard.
>every car would have a router in it.
For a site that sometimes purpots to be concered with the environment, should we really be so glib to add yet another reason to depend on cars for smooth operation of our social infratructure?
"Old man yells at systemd"
I agree, also I suppose your connection quality will vary greatly from daytime (when most cars are at the workplaces) to nitetime, when they are back home.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
An enlightened car company -- or better still EVERY car company -- should put a Mesh node in every car they make whether the owner wants it or not. Just what I need, to be tracked everywhere I go by the company I bought my car from. Even better, maybe M$ could buy into the car industry with its $40 billion, and then it could finally control everything!
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
> For a site that sometimes purpots to be
> concered with the environment, should we really
> be so glib to add yet another reason to depend
> on cars for smooth operation of our social
> infratructure?
I'm a little depressed at the thought of a world whose "social infrastructure" is the internet. Besides which, cars aren't always going to be damaging to the environment. Eventually they'll be electric.
Another, perhaps more fun, aspect of this is the idea of a mailserver vehicle, perhaps a post office vehicle. So that when the postman travels to *reall* out of the way places, not only will he bring paper mail, but his server could be holding electronic mail for delivery.
Cringely builds his argument for a widespread, car-based wireless network on the premise that the storage required by cars frequently disconnected from a network is an insurmountable problem, given the inability of Hard Disks Drives to survive in the hostile environment of a car. He believes that this problem will not be resolved by HDDs designed to better cope with that environment because the HDD companies can only afford to invest in research that will pay off within a year whereas the car companies plan four years ahead.
IMHO, it's a bit short-sighted to focus exclusively on HDDs; Flash memory makers are currently making great strides in producing chips that, in capacity, compete with miniture HDDs. Their primary financial motivation for this is the perceived huge market for personal MP3 players. I read one article a few months back that predicted a real head-to-head battle between Flash memory and IBM's tiny HDDs.
If we're going to be seeing Flash memory with several GBs capacity, I don't see why they shouldn't be used within cars.
Also, I don't see why the 4 year planning cycle for a new car should be such a problem; that time covers the design process for the car as a whole, no telematics system would be so intrusive as to require being part of that process from Day One. Indeed, it should be something that can be integrated within existing designs.
I'm wary of questioning Cringely's ideas because he does seem to have good sources on this but the direction he's taken that info doesn't seem to have been thought through properly.
Also, it's hard to accept his technical credibility when the software he uses for his site's forum is so damn tacky.
In case of a crash, the cars would each have a record of what all of the other cars in the area, etc. did.
Great idea Big Brother.
I certainly do not mind the idea of my having a record of what my car was doing, but nobody else, including the cops and insurance companies, gets that record until my lawyer and I decide to release or trade it.
As far as monitoring what other vehicles are doing around me, or you, I see no reason why we should not be "allowed" to record that either (passive systems, visual, sonar, etc). However, some courts disagree with me on that as a brief glance through the YRO section will show.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
This is exactly the idea I've always thought off, some sort of monsterous P2P network based on cars that constantly is changing. If we stop, security and privacy issues aside, what could we gain by implementing such a system?
1. An end to traffic congestion. How? Cyclic traffic lights try their best with weight sensors in the road, etc. to predict where traffic is, yet how much more efficient would it be to have some sort of central network saying "no one in left lane, go" and so on. Traffic jams for the most part would disappear. Really.
2. Accidents. These too would be reduced as the entire system would be more efficient. And when an accident did occur, the data in the computer (cars around it, etc.) would prove invaluable in determining the cause.
I don't want to be redundant, but doesn't anyone else see this as something that could really, really improve the quality of life (driving wise, at least) in the US? Sure I'm aware that's a huge infrastructure upgrade that would cost BILLIONS at least. However I think the gains far outweigh the downsides. Yes there are privacy issues, etc. I think the solution would be to simply limit the scope of the protocol to make intrusive privacy impossible due to the limited nature of what is going over the wire. (Err, through the air.) If all that the system can transmit is location, velocity, etc. then the system would not be able to butt in and gather all kinds of crap on you. Just design a very simple networking protocol (not TCP/IP or something, please, think much simpler....) designed JUST for a 'transit area network' and you are done. I don't see things like wireless ethernet in a car being terribly useful anyhow. Everyone talks about internet on a cell phone -- can a web page really look that great on a 1x1 (if you are lucky) screen? Okay, MS has a cell phone OS that supposedly operates in color -- again, is this really necessary? I don't think so.
I'd like something more like the R2 units which plug into X-wing and other Star Wars fighting craft. No domed head and swiveling is really necessary, though -- for instance, a laptop would be fine :)
Imagine slipping a laptop (with a microphone plugged into it's audio-in port) into a cushioned and cooled foam sleeve beneath the passenger seat, then hooking a single USB2, firewire, or ethernet cable to it from the car's "assistant" port. Or 802.11, or bluetooth, so no wire necessary. Heck, give that (whatever-it-is) connection the additional chore of carrying a bit of audio, and forget hooking a microphone line separately -- the mic is one of the parts I think could legitimately be part of the car's end of the system. Basically, I'd like one broadish-band connection from car to computer, but with the computer per se quite separate or at least separable.
What sort of things should the car tell the computer?
- sensor readings -- lots of 'em, for instance
...
- Engine Temperature, RPMs
- GPS and altitude (another set I think are OK to be in the car)
- Radar signals (naturally)
- Radio stations in order of reception strength
- Internal and external air temps, precip types
- apparent visibility
- Level and pressure of various fluids (including tire air)
- Horn use
- Speed (this is one which should be wipeable
:))
- Gas tank level (mine tends to ride low)
- Battery levels (a ridiculously underreported but important fact right now -- now even an LED bar indicated current charge)
- Recent fuel efficiency readings
- Cabin air quality -- might want an alert when it's below good levels.
- Light check (headlights, dome lights, map light, keyslot light, etc -- all working and in good order?)
- Doors shut / locked status
- Weight distribution in car
- Image / sound output, as applicable
- Standard webcam stream with one or more cameras either streaming or sending time-lapse images,
- Sonar / low-power radar / IR or whatever other imagery makes sense
- Audio output, two mics each in engine and cabin (for stereo location help) plus
- Direct feed from the a) the car's entertainment system as well as b) from a separate channel carrying any audio messages / warnings from the car itself (door-open buzzers etc).
What should the computer be able to effect through commands *to* the car?Most (but not all) of what I'd like a car computer to do is *collect* data: the point is not what specific data is collected, really, so much as that a number of prioritizeable datastreams are available and self-identifying in a standardized, non-proprietary, format which my droid (whether it looks like a laptop or not) can examine and store, to the degree that I've asked it to -- and that my droid can effect changes both general and situational to make driving easier / more pleasurable / safer.
The car should have the senses (sight, sound, etc) but the brain shouldn't be tied to the car itself -- the most intelligent part of the *car* side of things should be the gathering point for all those sensor's data streams, which should be built to deal with yet-unavailable or un-thought-of streams, so they can be passed on for analysis to the droid when they're eventually implemented.
On the droid side of things, there's no reason there should only be one way to look at or deal with the various datastreams. One person might want a basic black box doing nothing but recording the engine readings, distances traveled and cockpit chatter to a CLI-based utility box stored permanently in the trunk; another might want the whole shebang, down to engine timings and dome-light intensity, controllable from a pretty GUI running on a PowerBook.
If the ins and outs are standardized and available, both of those would be completely feasable. If they're built with some room to grow, the same droid could be updated to recognize and control new things. ("Hey, I added a quartet of over-wheel cams to get a 3D sense of surrounding traffic. I want to record them on my droid.")
There are dangers, sure, but worth working around. I don't want someone else to be able to shut down my engine remotely, not even the California State Police. I don't want a thief to be able to tell my car via 802.11 to open the windows, pop the trunk, and use a built-in olfactory sensor to find money, then blow it out the windows with the fan. Naturally. Current thieves are doing just fine with low-tech methods, though.
OK, I close with a sound of hope, which is roughly "beepTWIRRRdeedeezzzhmmmbeepb'beepsigh ..."
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I've always enjoyed reading Cringley. I like the way he breaks down complex issues to make them easy to understand. And I've always just assumed he knew what he was talking about. So when I see an article about the field I work in, telematics, I think "Cool! Finally someone to explain this to people!" But from reading the article, I think he is really out of his element here. Hard drives? What do hard drives have to do with anything? Has the lack of small rugged hard drives held back the PDA market? No, because there are plenty of other good ways to store data. Automotive systems can (and do) use DVD, CD-ROM, Compact Flash... Four year design cycles for cars? I wish. The industry is targetting 18 months, and some manufacturers are there already. The wireless stuff at the end of his article is interesting, but the rest is way off.