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Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX
Freshly Exhumed writes: Ford's in-car infotainment system known as Sync will soon evolve to add a capacitive touch screen, better integration with smartphone apps and, eventually, support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in version 3, thanks to a switch of operating systems. After years of teaming with Microsoft, the automobile giant has switched to BlackBerry's QNX, a real time operating system renowned for stability.
It's a car, not a fucking tablet.
Fusion owner here with the "my ford touch" sync system + touch sensitive climate/media controls on the console. Having to take your eyes off the road to make sure you're touching the right 1x1 inch area on the screen, or small indentation seems silly.
Every car I've had prior had physical buttons for these things that after about a week of owning the car could be operated completely by touch alone.
QNX has been the choice for realtime OSs for a long time. Blackberry has little to do with that but they certainly are trying to cash in on it.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
I had a windows phone, feeling let down by the windows phone/OS comes as a standard feature.
This is certainly welcome news. My sync has had issues from day one. A few examples (some fairly humorous)
1) I tell it to call someone. It responds "The requested contact is currently unavailable." No clue what that means. I assume it is having trouble figuring out the number since it hasn't synced phone numbers or something. It usually happens if I try to call shortly after dialing.
2) I tell it to call someone. It responds "No bluetooth device is available right now, I will try to connect one." Then it sits in silence. It eventually does connect, usually after a second or two, but never calls. I have to send the command again.
3) I tell it to call someone. It sits in silence for a while. My current record is about 5 minutes, and then it decides it's going to call. That's kind of awkward sometimes.
4) My time is wrong. I tried to correct my time. It goes back to 12:00 after doing so. Now the clock advances very slowly (like, 1 minute for every few hours.) Still don't know what's going on.
5) I switch to bluetooth audio, it says it is on bluetooth audio, my phone is playing audio to somewhere, but no sound comes out. I remove the pairing, then pair my phone again, and it works.
6) Occasionally, it will never understand what I say until I use the steering wheel buttons to cancel my command and start over.
7) Sometimes the physical buttons don't work and it will stop responding while my music is playing. Then suddenly it will catch up and all the times I hit forward or back on the track suddenly occur.
That's been my experience. I was told my clock can be fixed by having the dealership reinstall the OS. That would take about 6 hrs they say, which I can't really be without my work vehicle for that long so I've just lived with it. They've told me the other issues are fairly common and that they can't help me with it. Oh well. It is a nice idea and things will eventually improve with these sorts of things I'm sure.
Ditto. I don't want a car media interface. I want dedicated physical buttons & knobs for the climate, radio volume & input selection.
And a place on the dash to mount my own phone/tablet with a nearby USB plug.
I have never seen an electronic car interface that was any good at all, and that includes every navigation system I've ever seen. My phone has better navigation (Waze rocks), better audio, and a better interface than anything a can manufacturer could ever try to copy.
I only upgrade my car every 10+ years - an even then it might not be a new car. Hey Detroit - stop trying. Give up. Let Apple/Android/[new startup] give me the tech I want. If you want to get fancy, give the phone a read-only API to the car's status.
"I'm sorry Dave, I've BSOD'd... my mind... I can feel it going... I... I'm afraid I... qw30@#$%*(@#$... You seem to be trying to drive a car... How can I help?"
QNX may not be everywhere, but it was a mature product when Linux was just a kernel and people were grafting Minix functionality into the user space.
It does sound like an advertising pitch, but this is accurate about QNX. The OS isn't cheap, but it does offer realtime functionality. It also is designed to be quite stable to where a bug or a hang can cause tremendous disasters, be it software with X-ray machine or figuring out what position to move a set of control rods in a reactor. QNX has excellent internal security, and a decent development kit.
In embedded development, I'd probably use Linux for most items (because it has a wide variety of tools available), however if it is any way connected to something that can kill or seriously injure, like a component on a car's CANbus, I'd go QNX because it is going on 30 years and a very mature product. Realtime OS functionality isn't needed everywhere, but when it is needed, nothing else will do.
As for Ford's use, is it better than SYNC? This is more of an opinion question than anything else. I have had good luck with SYNC across a number of devices (Android and iOS), but others have had horror stories. Time will tell if end users prefer the QNX based audio head over previous ones.
You're an idiot, aren't you?
I remember back in 1995/1996 or so ... a 1.44MB floppy with a bootable image of QNX. It booted onto pretty much any machine we could find, identified all of the devices, found the ethernet, and had a web browser.
It was faster and more robust than Windows 95 was by a bloody long shot.
Blackberry bought QNX because it has had a reputation as being pretty bomb proof for a long time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As a real Sync user (from 2012), my experience has been that its problems have more to do with user interface than "stability". Even if QNX improves on the latter, it does nothing for the former.
Well, it might help indirectly. Every hour the developers don't spend trying to debug the OS is an hour they can instead spend on making the user interface work better. I suspect that a lot of mediocre products appear simply because there were so many showstopping bugs to chase down that there was never any time to smooth out the rough edges.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Microsoft actually had very little to do with the MyTouch system which was the second generation Sync system. Microsoft helped make the original Sync system which for 2007 was actually quite reasonable. For the second generation released in 2010 that was the one that Ford essentially had to rewrite internally to fix, that was done by BSquare -- admittedly that company was made of former Microsoft people and ran on Microsoft's Auto Platform.
The point is however blaming Microsoft for the interface they didn't have anything to do with is like blaming kernel maintainers for Gnome doing something stupid in their interface.
QNX is a great choice of an OS for a fairly fixed ecosystem of hardware where reliability is paramount, but just because the OS is good doesn't mean the interface will be.
Given that the stock price went from $2 in 2009 to $15 today, they were thinking they were smarter than you. Apparently they were right.
The focus I rented with sync was horrible.
To use ad2p audio, I had to connect the phone, and would get a message "to play music through Bluetooth, go to audio settings". There we're two audio settings headings, one two levels deep, the other three levels deep, and I could never remember which one to go to, or what the path to it was.
It would forget this setting every time I restarted the car.
The setting forgetting, the two menu items with same name, and the message telling me where to go leaving out the path to get there are all thing's I would consider terrible ui design.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Yes, QNX has been around for a long time.
\What most people don't get is what a realtime OS is, and why it matters. Other multitasking OSes are generally "best-effort" OSes, but in a realtime OS, the whole scheduling system is based on giving guarantees, making sure that things happen within a certain time frame or a certain order.
The overhead is huge, which is why you don't se RT on any normal desktops or servers, but in something like a car, airplane or hospital device, you would rather know that 100% of the requests get served in 100 ms, than having an average time of 10 ms, but a worst case time of 1000+ ms.
If you know the worst case, you can program your systems to operate within them.
Linux does have a RT version, in part supported by Ingo Molnar and Theodore Ts'o, but it does not see heavy use. In part, this has been because for a realtime OS to be successful, all the parts have to play ball, not just some. And in part it is because a realtime OS is quite a bit slower on average, and most regular users would rather have improved average speeds than improved worst-case.
But for a car? Give me a realtime OS any day. I don't want traction control to cut in a tenth of a second too late because the kernel was busy doing garbage collection, time synchronization, and handling an urgent warning that the oil temperature was too high.