Slashdot Mirror
How Ford Will Upgrade Owners' Display Screens
gManZboy writes "'Sometime early next year, Ford will mail USB sticks to about 250,000 owners of vehicles with its advanced touchscreen control panel. The stick will contain a major upgrade to the software for that screen. With it, Ford breaks the model in which the technology in a car essentially stayed unchanged from assembly line to junk yard' — and Ford becomes a software company. This shift created a hot new tech job at Ford: human-machine interface engineers — people who come from a range of backgrounds, from software development to mechanical engineers, and who can live in the worlds of art and science at once."
yup. sounds about right.
"people who come from a range of backgrounds, from software development to mechanical engineers, and who can live in the worlds of art and science at once"
did MLK write the summary?
Sounds like an opening for a black hat to compromise a Ford vehicle with some mal-ware.
Seriously... the article writer and story submitter haven't been involved with or paying attention to autos for the past.. oh.. 10+ years?
Most "recalls" anymore are for flashing the software or programming in the ECU, TCM, BCM, or whatever other module. There's a recent 2007-2010 model year Honda recall for transmissions shifting issues that the fix is flashing new programming into the computer. How is that not software?
Heck, GM radios (yes, made by delco or whoever) come with certain features locked out.. to unlock say the input port to work with XM requires plugging it into the shop computer and basically "flipping some bits" in the radio firmware (for lack of better terms) to enable the feature.
There are older recalls that are just software updates.. and these updates are as much software and done by the car manufacturer as the Ford update (IE: Ford doesn't make the radios, other companies do.. some companies that make OEM radios include: Fujitsu Ten (Eclipse), Panasonic, Delco, Alpine, Pioneer, Becker, Kenwood, JVC... most of that short list I typed out also still make or made after market radios at some point.
I don't know for Ford, but German automotive manufacturers have dealt with human/machine interfacing for a very long time,
and in the process have not focussed on software/screen only, but also added many more interfacing methods like buttons, dials, cameras facing into the car and outside.
Names that come to mind are car manufacturers (Audi, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz) and their suppliers (Continental, Hella, Vector Informatik).
The whole topic has been covered not by computer science or engineers, but very much by information science.
So maybe you want to have a look there if you are into this topic.
Keywords: driver assistance, hmi, navigation systems
- Hubert
I'm pleased that they're paying attention to this; unfortunately I bought a 2011 edge without the fancy screen, so I'm in the-hell-of-1974-bad-stereo-control, to the power of many-more-features-shoehorned-in.
I *am* curious why that touchscreen - which is approximately the size of 2 smartphones - was a $1611 upgrade from the basic controls.
Right now I (apparently) have the software and most of the systems in my car, but imagine trying to run an mp3 player, navigation system, bluetooth phone, etc with THIS (http://image.motortrend.com/f/2008_ford_edge/2308898196140957893+ppromo_mt_large/center_console.jpg) set of controls?
I seriously can't wait until all cars have at least a USB port so I can save/store/communicate things like radio stations, seat preferences, etc all just by uploading my own user config. It'd be even nicer to get diagnostic data from the car that way that's a little more comprehensive than "oh, the red light is on".
-Styopa
There is a whole field in industrial psychology which studies the interaction between human and machine in terms of information flow and decision making. These guys and gals work for the CIA, NSA, FAA, NASA, DOD, etc.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The upgrade is to fix UI issues. How bad is the UI? I rented a Ford Focus a month ago and could not figure out how to switch the radio station to a non-programmed location!!
The screen gave you no indication and none of the likely combinations worked, and I'm a techie who loves gadgets, CLI, etc.
I can only wonder what would the average customer experience be like.
The summary is a little misleading. This is not a "major upgrade," it is a complete rewrite of the MyFord Touch system. You see, for their first attempt, Ford decided to outsource the project to a company called BSQUARE who put the UI together using Adobe Flash Lite. For some reason, the results were slightly less than stellar.
Anyway, Microsoft itself is supposedly helping with the rewrite and Ford is doing the rest in-house (without Flash) so those of us who have been dealing with this awful system for the last year are at least a little hopeful.
giggity
... is not that Ford is updating software in cars; it is that USB sticks and US mail to million of owners is now cheaper than paying the mechanic to plug-in the car and flash the radio.
What's different here is that Ford is now shipping software to their customers, as opposed to having their customers go back to their favorite garage and have the mechanic plug the car into a magic computer, that often even he has only a faint clue of how it works. This is a significant paradigm shift. It means that Ford will be able to manage more frequent software releases, and maybe start thinking about changing whole features within the lifetime of the car, outside of regular "oh you need to have an inspection after 100 000km" kind of things. So that's cool.
Now the bad part is that your "computer-car" stays proprietary software, and there will probably still be no way in hell that you will be able to modify that software yourself, unless you do some reverse engineering. But it necessarily opens up interesting avenues like running Rockbox on your radio receiver, or flashing some controllers with free software for some of us that are into that kind of crazy thing. I say "necessarily" because the car owners do not have the proprietary interfaces to interoperate with the car, which are a significant barrier of entry for us wannabe car hackers.
In order for Ford to deliver that software to joe users, it means it has to lower this barrier of entry, and that can only be a good thing for everyone.
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
Close all the windows.
Have gnu, will travel.
Guess I am one of the lucky ones, I have worked with some great developers whom we farmed work too. We had two on the team over there who were better than most of the developers we had locally. It might depend on the type of work involved, my shop is on mid and larger systems and our requirements are a whole lot stricter so we don't see what others might.
Still to dismiss a whole part of the industry under thinly veiled bigotry does not serve the Slashdot community well. I guess its easy to ride along on the misery train and blame the other guy, but first we must dismiss his ability because if we did not then where we would be.
So guys, cool it with the assertion that off shore developers are not up to speed, the simple fact is there are many good developers in other parts of the world and many are far better than those who whine about them
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
PERHAPS the fact that the customer is updating the firmware themselves is something new. But as others have pointed-out, car manufacturers have been updating firmware in engine and other onboard computers for years.
Human-Machine Interface Engineer? Not new either. Let me tell you how I turned some line workers into Human-Machine Interface Engineers 30 years ago...
I was working for a small company in Michigan that made measurement and control systems used on automotive assembly lines. We were working on a system for a Bendix axle plant. It read a Brinell (hardness) gauge, and controlled the movement of the part through the station, application of the gauge, good/bad paint spray, etc.
The company was perpetually behind, they had one and a half software people (I was the one - the other was a hardware guy that dabbled), and they didn't want to bother me about this job until I'd finished the prior one. So, I finish up this job and they tell me they've got this new job for me to do, and they're sending me to Ohio the next day on the primary contractor's private plane.
They had the hardware put together. They told the client they were sending two guys to wire-in the system. No software had been written or designed. I didn't even know what it was supposed to do. They briefed me...
We arrive at the plant and the guy we meet starts screaming at us. We were two days late. We didn't KNOW that we were two days late, but we were apparently two days late.
While my co-worker started wiring-in the the box, I set up my Altair (yes, really) on the plant floor next to the line. So, for two weeks, I sat there with this deafening noise designing and writing code. The line was down, of course, and the two workers responsible for it had to stand around twiddling their thumbs.
You haven't felt pressure till you've shown-up at an axle plant two days late to write software on the plant floor from scratch, with the line down, and two monkeys hovering around twiddling their thumbs.
The line workers might have had some light maintenance tasks, but otherwise they didn't have anything to do, so they helped out. Sometimes we need them to operate the equipment, etc.
We had a panel with a small LCD display (a few characters) and a bunch of big, industrial buttons in neat rows and columns. And no design. At all. (OK, I mean, we knew what we needed to do with the gauges and solenoids. We knew the operating sequence of the line. But there was no per-determined UI design.)
So in a leap of faith I ask the guys: "how do you want this to work?" Why not? These were they guys that have to work the machine every day. Who better to do the UI design?
They were delighted. I made the buttons work the way the line workers thought the buttons should work. I made the display show messages that were meaningful to them. It really helped to smooth-over the situation of us arriving late with nothing but a gutless box that did nothing to wire-in...