Open Pilot Comma 2

Hi Rob, and thanks for your insight and for the link.

You may recall me as a happy owner of you 240V cable for my stock 110V Toyota charger. Still loving the much-shorter charge time!
I'll read up on the thread and then see about a new battery. My 2017 Prime was a leftover that I bought in May 2018, by the way.

 

Rob- one quick follow up: if I leave my Prime connected to its EV charger, even after it's fully recharged, does the EV charger somehow maintain the 12V battery at a good state of charge, or is that 12V circuit independent and thus gets no electrons from the EV charger?

 

I just got one the other week. It works well for what it is, but it's not self driving like some have said. It's just improved DRCC and lane centering. It handles reasonable mountain roads/freeway interchanges fine because it slows down for turns. I have a long highway commute, so it'll be a gamechanger for me. I am not a programmer, but decent with software (love to mess with root and roms, etc.). I am horrible with hardware, but I was able to install it pretty centered on the windshield and run the wire behind the curtain airbag down to the ODB port. The part that took the longest was getting the camera cover back on after connecting the comma 2 because there's not a lot of space under the cover. Took about an hour probably.

Now for the technical stuff: it works better on cars with TSS 2.0 (supposedly coming to the 2021 Prime). For cars with TSS-P, we need to unplug our DSU (sometimes causes delays in starting the car due to errors) or buy an sDSU in order to be able to use comma's DRCC. Also, the pre-2019 primes have a very inaccurate steering sensor. 2019/2020 is better, and the tss2.0 cars are much better. But you can buy something called a ZSS which improves the sensor substantially. You can make the 2018 prime one of the best cars for Comma 2, but you have to get a couple extra parts installed.

I heard about comma when I bought the car 1 year ago. I've spent half a year seriously thinking about it. Read their wiki: Home · commaai/openpilot Wiki · GitHub and search their discord https://discord.comma.ai/ . Worse comes to worse, they do have a 30 day money back guarantee.

 

First, I'm very happy to hear that you're enjoying fast charging times using your Rob43 Adapter !

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Until recently...it was thought that if you left the EVSE continually connected to a Prime, it would trickle charge the 12v battery.

BUT, we have recently learned thanks to @Salamander_King that leaving the EVSE connected continually after the traction battery (big battery) is charged it actually pulls power out of the 12v battery leading slowly to a dead 12v battery.

It is my recommendation that you check your 12v battery with a voltmeter, and occasionally connect a trickle charger in an effort to top it off.



Rob43

 

Hey mistermojorizin, thanks for a very helpful explanation. I guess I should be in the market for a ZSS, since my Prime is a 2017. I have another year of warranty remaining, so I am reluctant to open up the steering column and swap out (?) the DSU (if that's correct, I'm not sure). Who sells the ZSS (Eric?)?

What an "alphabet soup" the whole Comma 2 experience has engendered! Acronyms like sDSU, DRCC, forks, ZSS, DSU... it is all very intimidating to me, a finance guy with no programming experience.

If they can ever get the time to compose some detailed product literature and a simple user's guide, more folks like me would buy. As it is now, the wiki, plus time on the forum chasing down the fragments of useful info to put together an answer, is all we are afforded.

Hi Rob- I'll put my Fluke on the battery this morning. I will also probably put it in-line with the battery to measure the battery drain when the Prime is powered-off.

The whole matter is rather concerning; do I replace the battery, or drive around with a charger in the rear seat footwell, or both?

I have never been able to find a good battery tester to assess the "health" of a battery. The old testers with massive resistors (carbon pile) were, I guess, the best way to stress-test a battery, but you'd think we'd have an easier way by now.

 

Howdy - I can confirm that the dang gadget is learning! I drove east on the 108 through Sonora to Soulsbyville, and it never once kissed the double-yellow line. That is the particular drive where it happened a lot. We'll see if it "holds" or reverts back to its old habit of crossing into the double yellow. I noticed yet another update is ready, but I like the current version since it has improved with age...

Try some more driving and see if it centers in the lane better.

 

You can buy the comma2, follow the basic install instructions, just hook up the plug n play hardware, connect to wifi and put in 1 web address and have like 80 to 85 percent of the full experience. Better than Tesla in one major way that Tesla even if you buy full self driving, nags you to hold the wheel and eventually locks you out if not. 30 days money back if you don't like it. Edit: If you get a 2021 prime with tss2.0, or any of the newer toyotas that already have tss2.0 with the new sensor and no dsu, thats it.

Going further is tricky though. The dsu and zss are in the glovebox also plug and play and you buy them together from the user you mentioned. With the dsu you can have yours modified and sent back to you or you can buy a smart dsu, which is a true replacement part so you can plug and play your old one back in for warranty. It's one bolt for the dsu and one wire ran back to the comma for the zss. So far still pretty straightforward and that's 95 percent for your prime.

Going further gets harder software wise. Fork gets you like 99 percent of max. And then there's tuning and other hihger level stuff that is above my level of understanding.

They make it hard on purpose for a few reasons. Legal liability and screening out users that will require more support. They call it a devkit and tell you its alpha level software. The owner has certain views on where he wants to go and this step is a way getting data and funding his vision...which I've gathered included insurance, selling ai to a car company and eventually solving selfdriving. My backgrounds not in tech either. Accounting, corporate law, and education. But tech is a fun hobby.

 

I took it up to a casino on a pretty wisty mountain road the other day and set speed at 50 and it handled it on the stock 0.7.6 without intervention. I've since installed a fork and tuned one line of code to make it slow down a little more for turns, and it now handles that drive at 60, slowing down by itself for turns. I'm just usually 75 on freeways and interchanges though and it's fine for that.

 

If you hit settings, and hit calibrate (not reset), it will show how well its mounted. Mine says 0.2 degrees left and 1.8 degrees up. It doesn't hug the yellow line.

On discord thats the advice for lack of centering -heres avideo https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DQay2ioNJT30&ved=2ahUKEwie1NKrx5TqAhW8HjQIHdAQCJMQuAIwC3oECAYQBA&usg=AOvVaw2MtrueM7vXdL4N0A26vYRh

 

What a wealth of information herein! Since the ZSS and SDSU are both plug and play, and my 2017 Prime is the least capable, I think I'll contact Erich and order them both. Thanks again

 

just know he calls "deluxe" smartDSU the one where you get a new DSU and smartenedDSU the one where you send him your part and it gets modified and sent back. just fyi

 

@High Mileage @cirruspete I've had my OpenPilot setup running for almost 2 years in my 2018 Prime. I added the SDSU and ZSS a few months ago (note: the ZSS is useful for 2017 and 2018 Primes; newer Primes don't need it). It is well worth the expense of getting them. Installation is very easy. The driving is so much smoother now. Feel free to ask if you have some more specific questions. Rob

 

The jerky driving is exactly what I was experiencing. Others describe it as ping-ponging. ZSS solves that.

The SDSU does a few things. It hands over longitudinal (distance to the car ahead) control to OpenPilot. The only way to do that without an SDSU is to unplug the DSU. Unfortunately that gives errors and removes AEB (automatic emergency braking). The SDSU resolves both these problems. Erich also pulls the ZSS power from the SDSU. That simplifies the ZSS installation and allows him to prevent power drain of the Prime’s 12V battery.

i don’t remember the price exactly. The pair was somewhere around $350USD. For me, that was money well spent.

You have to send him your DSU. Removing it involves removing the glovebox, unplugging the cable, and undoing one nut — very simple. The car can be driven without it while you’re waiting its return. Erich’s turnaround time is very quick.

ZSS installation is also easy. He’s got some videos to guide you. You’ll have to find a glue to attach it to the steering column. He suggests Permatex Silicone Adhesive and you can briefly see it in one of the videos.

https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/permatex-black-rtv-silicone-adhesive-sealant-16br-80-ml-0383717p.html#srp

Hope this helps.

Rob

 

Search google for “comma eon workbench”. That will give you links to an article about Workbench and the GitHub for it. Workbench is software that an OpenPilot user wrote to simplify the process of SSH.

It becomes really helpful for ZSS users who must use Erich’s custom form. For the moment, we can’t use Comma’s code. [Hopefully the ZSS code will eventually be pulled into the official code].

 

I’m a very satisfied OpenPilot/Comma user myself, and a lot of things have been covered in the thread, but I just wanted to add a few more items that have not been discussed:

• Comma fuses the car’s radar with its cameras, along with readings from the CAN bus to sense/control your car.
  
  
• Comma 2 no longer suffers from overheating. With the older kit (the EON, which I have), it was essentially an Android smartphone in a custom 3d-printed case, with some cooling fins and a cooling fan. With the Comma 2, they went further and:
  • removed the battery from the smartphone, which was the main contributor to overheating. This allows you to leave it mounted at all times, even in direct sunlight. With the EON, I still have to dismount it when parking in sunlight during summer months.
  • improved quieter cooling
    
  • added infrared LEDs, so it can monitor the driver for alertness even at night (the EON can only do vision-based driver monitoring during the day. At night, similar to Tesla, it monitors driver alertness by monitoring steering wheel touches)
    
• As its a smartphone in a case, it can do things even when the car is off. With the optional Comma Prime, you get unlimited internet connectivity for $24/mo. With it, you can currently 1) monitor both cameras - both the driver-facing and road-facing cameras, 2) see where your car is on the Comma smartphone app, 3) be able to SSH into the system from anywhere, and 4) have 1 year of cloud-storage for all your drives.
  
  Without Comma Prime, you need to 1) periodically connect the system to wifi to get over-the-air (OTA) updates, SSH in, and upload your drives to contribute to the training data corpus, 2) you don’t get remote camera/location access, and 3) you only have a few days cloud storage (~ <7 days) for your drives.
  
  There is talk of future Comma Prime features (remote start, remote door lock/unlock, real-time CAN bus monitoring, etc.), but that’s not the current priority of the Comma dev team, though there is an available API for folks who want to develop these capabilities.
  
  I used to have Comma Prime, but found the current feature set a bit limited to justify the $24/mo charge, and I discontinued it with no ill effect beyond the slight inconvenience of bringing the kit home every few days, as it will refuse to engage after having no network access for 7 days by default. As its open-source, I’m using a fork that has changed the OTA check to 30 days.
  
  
• Car battery discharge issues have largely been solved. The latest code now intelligently powers off the system when it detects the car battery is below a certain voltage threshold.

I have it installed on my 2017 Prius Prime Advanced. In addition to the Comma kit, I also installed a new steering sensor (ZSS - Zorro steering sensor - Zorro is the handle of the community member who came up with it), as the stock TSS-P steering sensor was not sensitive enough (causing slight “ping-ponging” when driving inside a lane, as the OP oversteers because of the coarseness of the steering angle readings). With the newer Primes with TSS2, Toyota has upgraded the steering sensor, so there’s no need for this.

I also upgraded my Driver Support Unit (DSU). The DSU is responsible for cruise control and automatic emergency braking (AEB). With my “SmartenedDSU”, OpenPilot now also controls acceleration/deceleration (longitudinal) in addition to steering (lateral), without loosing AEB.

Without SDSU, you had two options - 1) Rely on stock cruise control, and just let OP handle steering. 2) Disconnect the DSU and get better/smarter OP acceleration/deceleration, but you loose AEB.

Since I’ve installed the kit last year, I’ve been on several road trips with OP taking care of 95% plus of the driving and now actually look forward to them now - NYC to Orlando and back; NYC to Montreal and back; NYC to the Hamptons and back.

It also performs superbly in stop-and-go traffic.

With that said, bear in mind, that:

1. its still a Level 2 system and not full self driving. You still need to pay attention and be able to take over at any time.
2. it still a devkit, that requires a fair bit of developer basics (command line programs, SSH, git)