Tesla Full Self-Driving Computer

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Kevin

Tesla called.

My 2018 Model 3 was manufactured about 8 months before Tesla started including the Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer in all its cars. Those of us bought the FSD Capability option are entitled to an upgrade. My car came up on the list and Tesla called to schedule the installation. It will happen on February 3, and they say it will take most of the day. This should be interesting.

I’ve published a few “transition” articles here at Blog Or Die, and I’m going to chronicle this upgrade because it’s part of the transition from “not full self-driving” to “full self-driving.” I’ve found very little content on the Internet on the transition. There are YouTube videos about the upgrade process, but not about how the car behaves differently later. One video talks about the differences a little, bit it’s an old one (before Beach Buggy Racing 2) and the things he tested were totally uninteresting to me.

What I know now is that my current Hardware 2.5 computer is not capable of handling video from all 8 cameras; it only supports 4. The FSD computer is capable of adding the two front facing cameras and two side cameras also front facing. Cars with the FSD computer today have additional visualizations on the touch screen for traffic cones and traffic signals. I should start seeing those immediately. My first big question will be how well the FSD computer and the new neural net handle curvy two-lane highways, which represent half of my daily driving. Is it what I need to handle a few rough spots, or is that something I’ll have to wait for?

The upgrade has been finished. When I picked up the car the service person started to explain to me that the new computer had to be calibrated. I interrupted to say that I knew about that, that the car calibrated when it was new, and that it recalibrated when I replaced the windshield. He explained that this would take longer because more cameras had to be calibrated. I have read that the process requires driving 50-100 miles. Mine calibrated in about 10 miles.

I expected to be able to write a nice article on the new computer, but really there wasn’t much to say. Maybe auto lane change was a little better, but I’m not sure. It drives pretty much the same. I turned on visualization preview and the car displays stop signs, turn lanes, traffic lights, traffic cones and trash cans–lots of trash cans. I also got error messages: One said the left front fender camera was blocked, another said multiple cameras were blocked. Both went away. Tesla says not to worry, that the car is really OK. The message doesn’t necessarily mean that the camera is blocked, but that it could be blinded by bright lights.

One thing was different today. I drove a road segment that I drive frequently, and consistently, the car fails to make a sharp turn at one spot. Today the car made the turn, just running over the line into the oncoming lane a little bit, and then corrected. This bears further experimentation. Perhaps the car was just following the car in front this time.

So now, I’ll just have to wait for “feature complete” full self-driving and the rewrite of the neural network.

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Tesla voice commands

Posted on December 30, 2019 by Kevin

Tesla cars had a few voice commands, and a promise from Elon Musk that one day, almost everything could be controlled by voice. Well, Merry Christmas!

I was originally planning to compile a list of commands, but (silly me) a crowd sourced project encompasses everything I knew, and 10 times more. So here is the V10.2 Voice Commands List. There are about 100 of them.

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Mac & Cheese 1.0

Posted on October 20, 2019 by Kevin

I do love a good Mac & Cheese, but you never know what you’re going to get in a restaurant. Some of it is pretty awful, so I thought I would make my own, with the thought in the back of my mind of aiming for something like my mother made.

Mac & Cheese recipes abound on the Internet, but as I went through them, they had ingredients that I didn’t have, like condensed milk, canned Alfredo sauce and such. I decided to just make something without a recipe. Also those recipes were huge in quantity anyway. My wife is out of town, and I really don’t need to feed eight.

I chose to start with 8 oz of macaroni. I boiled that for 5 minutes (1 less than the minimum on the box directions) in a lot of salted water. While that boiled, I started a roux. I used 2 tablespoons of butter, melted in a pot on medium high heat into which I stirred 2 tablespoons of all purpose flour, stirring constantly with a wire whisk until the mixture started to brown. I then added 2 cups of 2% milk and some fresh ground black pepper, then continued to stir, adjusting the temperature to keep the mixture at a minimum boil. Then I stirred and stirred and stirred. Once the mixture started to thicken (stuck to the whisk), I added about a teaspoon of mustard powder and a little onion powder.

I put the cooked macaroni in a baking dish, but thought it was a little too much, so I put part of it in a ramekin. I microwaved some sliced Conecuh Sausage and added that to the macaroni (this can be purchased at grocery stores in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Southwest Virginia or online from Amazon or direct from Conecuh). Then I poured the roux over the macaroni and topped with a generous layer of grated 5-cheese mix I got at Costco.

Then I baked the whole thing for 35 minutes at 350 degrees F. I think less cooking would be OK. Now it’s done and cooling. It looks like this:

Update: It’s cooled enough to eat, and if I say so myself, it’s pretty good. I’d be proud to take this to a church dinner. I would make one change, omit the sausage. I really like Conecuh sausage and I think it adds flavor to lots of dishes, but in this case it slightly overpowered the subtle flavor of the macaroni. Next time I’ll cut the bake time to 30 minutes.

I miss Mom.

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The Tesla “Dog Mode” bug story

Posted on August 1, 2019 by Kevin

It’s all over the Internet: Tesla’s “Dog Mode” has a serious bug; it doesn’t work if the AC fan is set to manual. One headline said “Musk vows to fix.” But is there really such a bug?

Dog Mode is a cool feature Tesla added to run the AC when no one is in the car. It displays a image of a dog on the touch screen along with the car’s interior temperature, so passers by won’t be worried about the pet. I’ve used it myself a couple of time and it worked great. Of course any responsible pet owner checks up on the temperature anyway with the Tesla App.

People love their pets, and any threat of them is big news.

It all started on Twitter.

Elon Musk replied with one word “fixing.” I don’t call that confirmation, but damage control, and a commitment to fix a bug if there is one, but here’s what’s on the Internet:

So what’s wrong with this story?

First it’s impossible. With the current version of Tesla firmware (I have 2019.24.4), you can’t put turn on Dog Mode with the AC fan set to Manual. When you turn on Dog Mode, the car automatically sets the fan to AUTO. I tried it. Further, if you do set the fan to Manual after turning on Dog Mode, it still works just fine. I turned on Dog Mode, set the fan to manual, exited the car and watched it cool to the set temperature on the Tesla App. I tested this on a 2018 Model 3 and a 2016 Model S.

None of those stories said anything about confirming it. I consider this highly irresponsible. Maybe there is a bug, but my cars don’t have it. Who knows? Certainly not all the writers of these articles.

Update: The “Fix”

Tesla is rolling out a “Dog Mode” improvement. I got mine today (Aug. 7) in firmware 2019.28.2 along with a Chess game, volume control improvements and game controller support for Beach Buggy Racing 2.

The “fix” is to disable the AC controls (except for temperature) when Dog Mode is enabled. I still haven’t figured out what the problem was is unless it was to prevent the driver from turning on Dog Mode, setting the AC fan to manual, and then lowering the fan speed so far that it couldn’t keep the car cool. I guess we could call this fix “idiot proof dog mode.”

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Tesla Navigate on Autopilot

Posted on July 16, 2019 by Kevin

I’m returned from my 5,000-mile Model 3 road trip, which gave me a great deal of time to think about Tesla Autopilot as I supervised it across the US and back.

Technically NoA works as designed most of the time. It changes lanes to follow the route, it exits, it merges and it passes slower traffic on controlled-access highways. In one instance it tried to take the wrong exit in a rather complicated interchange, and in another it failed to take an exit when it should have. I caught both of them before a mistake was completed.

What NoA fails to do is operate with “common sense”; for example, a human is not going to attempt to pass a car that has slowed slightly with its blinker on approaching an exit ramp. I know the car is going to take the exit and I don’t need to pass. I also know not to try to pass a car going one mph slower than me near the top of a hill; that car is going to speed up after cresting the hill and I’ll never get around it. I tend to drive near the posted speed limit and sometimes other cars go faster. NoA will put you in the passing lane sometimes and back up a lot of traffic; if I were driving myself, I wouldn’t have attempted to pass in those circumstances.

Sometimes I couldn’t figure out why NoA failed to start a passing maneuver when it should have. Sometimes NoA is almost prescient, predicting that it’s going to need to pass before I detect the distant slow down, but other times NoA will come up behind a truck traveling 10 mph slower them me and just sit there. Suffice it to say that there is room for improvement.

I set NoA to signal me by vibrating the wheel when it is about to pass. That way I know to tug the wheel to make sure the car knows I’m holding it. The worst thing about Autopilot is holding the wheel, but the car not sensing it. It’s a constant distraction and annoyance. You can’t hold tension on the wheel for 8 hours a day without relaxing. My wrist was getting sore.

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The Great American Model 3 Road Trip

Posted on June 21, 2019 by Kevin

I’d never taken a trip this long, over 5,000 miles across the United States from Virginia to Idaho, Yellowstone, Denver and back. But it seemed like an adventure, and I figured that Tesla Autopilot would do most of the driving. So here we go …

Day 1

Day 1 starts in Palmyra, Virginia where I live. I charged to 100% at home on my Tesla Model 3 Long Range RWD. The result was a surprising 308 miles of range. I expected closer to 325. I think a couple of things, including the fact that I never charge to 100%, nor let it go low, has has not allowed the battery management system to calibrate itself. The car supposedly had 310 miles to start with and a software update should have increased it to 325.

We drove to Louisville, KY on the first of our 400-mile segments. Autopilot did a great job on the Interstate highways. All I had to do was watch. Still it was a tiring day.

A special unplanned side trip was to the Kentucky Folk Art Center at Morehead. Admission is free and the collection is quite interesting.

Day 2

The second segment was from Louisville to Columbus, Missouri, the fastest growing city in the state. We had some seriously heavy rain on the trip, so heavy I could barely make out the lines on the highway. Fortunately Autopilot didn’t have that problem. Check out this video, focusing your eyes on the place a driver typically watches to find lane lines:

Some of the rain was so heavy I could hardly even see the road, much less the lines. Autopilot drove in much heavier rain that in that video clip.

When we arrived in Columbus I made my usual check for Tesla News at Electrek, and found that the latest firmware update for the car has increased Supercharging speed. That explains why the car keeps charging before we’re finished eating or even going to the restroom. This is not like the old days in our Tesla Model S 75 when we spent lots of time waiting. I considered 75 kW good for that car, but I was peaking at 146 kW today.

I have some comments on Navigate on Autopilot in a separate article.

Day …

So this journal of the great American electric road adventure didn’t develop as I planned because there really isn’t much adventure. We finished the trip to Idaho. It was totally straightforward. Autopilot certainly took the strain out long drives.

One thing happened after our arrival. We met family and the went on a tour of Yellowstone National Park. My car doesn’t seat 6, so a van was rented and LastGas (what I named my Model 3) was parked at a relative’s house. That’s where I made my mistake. I left Sentry Mode on and that keeps a good part of the car’s electronics running. Over several days we lost a good deal of range, perhaps 80 miles. I should have turned Sentry Mode off. But not to worry: when I realized what had happened, I just plugged in to a 120V outlet and the car adds 5 miles an hour. If I wanted Sentry Mode on, I should have plugged in. It’s recovered all the lost mileage in less than a day.

While I didn’t have the opportunity to drive my Model 3 in Yellowstone, I thought about it. We saw three Teslas in the park. I was surprised to learn that there is a Tesla Supercharger station in West Yellowstone, at the park entrance. I also saw a ChargePoint charging station in the park somewhere. The park roads were perfect for Tesla Autopilot, and Autopilot would make it much easier for the driver to take in the scenery, and to deal with the inevitable backups at animal sightings. I’m not going to drive another 5,000 miles again just to visit Yellowstone in a Tesla, but it would certainly be fun.

Or not…

I want to thank the hypothetical reader of this post for causing me to write that previous sentence, because after writing it I had a realization. I really wasn’t that far from Yellowstone, staying with family. I had a free day, so why not take Model 3 to Yellowstone right then, so I did. I drove from Swan Valley, Idaho, to West Yellowstone, Wyoming, and charged up a little while I got breakfast at McDonald’s a block away in the cold and light rain and then headed into the park. It was right before the 4th of July, and the park was pretty crowded, so I avoided the big name attractions and visited some new things, Firehole Road, the Keppler Cascade, and the Left Thumb Geyser field. I did see Old Faithful again erupt as I was driving in for lunch. Autopilot worked great on the well-lined roads of Yellowstone and when traffic bunched up, it was so much more pleasant to let the car stop and go.

And back again

Generally I had zero problems plugging in. Only Teslas were parked at Superchargers, and I think 5 of 8 was the most occupancy I found, and usually I was alone. The one exception was in Jackson, Wyoming. All 8 Tesla charging spots were occupied at one point, mine the only Tesla. To be fair, 6 of the occupied parking places are shared spots. Only the slot on the left was parked inappropriately in a reserved spot.

8 Supercharging slots. One Tesla charging and 7 gas cars parked.

I drove back on my solo trip to Yellowstone through Jackson and stopped at the same location in the middle of the afternoon with a very different result:

Jackson, Wyoming, Supercharger — all by myself

In Rawlings, Wyoming, I found what I think was vandalism. Four Superchargers were damaged so that the charging handles couldn’t be reattached to the charger–leaving them on the ground. Rawlings is adjacent to Sinclair, an oil company town.

I-70 west of Denver was an awful road, with lines completely worn off on many curves, along with uneven pavement and construction. Autopilot, which worked amazingly across Nebraska, had rough going going east through Colorado.

It was great to visit my son in Denver, who also drives a Model 3.

One odd thing happened at one of the Superchargers–the bill was $0.00 for 30 kWh. The only mishap on the trip was two big rocks thrown at the windshield resulting in two large cracks and the necessity of replacing the glass, which I did the day after we returned.

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Tesla Autopilot vs. Farm Machinery

Posted on May 29, 2019 by Kevin

Tesla Autopilot is still described as “Beta” because the human driver has to maintain vigilance to ensure safety. I don’t usually share my Autopilot outtake videos in public, but this one is interesting in pointing out one of the challenges for AI self-driving, handling the unusual.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the piece of farm equipment that pulled in front of my Model 3 today while Autopilot was enabled. The speed was 45 mph. I wondered what would happen, and at the last minute I slammed on my brakes to prevent a collision that would surely have occurred had I not done so.

I use Autopilot a lot and I will continue to use it. I will also continue to watch the road.

Firmware 2019.16.2.

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