OTA Updates - Technical Info

[RickMachE]

Who remembers 28.8 connection speed?

Youngster.

I first used a 300 baud modem, upgrading to 1200 and then 2400 at one point. When 56K was the standard, it was big time. Of course my first computer has two 256K floppy drives (DOUBLE SIDED), up from the standard 128K single sided. First hard drive was 10MB in an IBM-XT (my second computer, first was IBM-PC).

Got my first computer when in grad business school. Had a computer simulation game we played in one marketing class, and one group was spying on people as they typed their entries in before each simulation ran at night. We typed ours in knowing they were watching. Then, I went home, logged in at 1200 baud, and changed the entries. I was the only person in my program with a home computer.

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[noway]

Have you ever actually run ethernet over coax? It SUUUUUUUUCKED.

Don't miss that at all!

I have! It is kind of the same issue as cable based internet services have, and wifi.. multiple devices sharing the same medium. As does CANBUS also. The good thing about todays ethernet physical standards (except for wireless) is that they are all point to point, no more multiple devices connected to the same cable trying to compete on the same physical cable.

I tried to read a little bit about the automotive ethernet and I think what they are doing is running point to point links with multiple devices on the same cable using different pairs for each, so if they used a standard cat5 cable it would be 4 devices connected to the same cable, but each device would have its own pair to some device acting as a switch.

Looking at the connector list for the Mach-E there are 4 ethernet connectors on the gateway module (GWM), each two wires, and they go each to one of the ethernet connected devices. They are marked ADAS (IPMA module I assume), TCU (4G modem), APIM (sync screen device) and ICC (instrument cluster screen). So those links are either just used as point to point between gateway module and each module, or there are switching or routing features in the GWM module. I would assume there are some kind of switching or routing features to allow things like cameras to be streamed to the sync screen. We already know firmware updates to those modules can go through the ethernet connections, via the gateway module (via the USB port connected APIM)

So in the next iterations of hardware we are probably going to see more and more of the CAN busses going away and replaced with star shaped ethernet links. Possibly seeing some wierd protocols like CAN over IP to provide compatibility with CAN diagnostics tools for a while.

 

[strangeengine]

I have! It is kind of the same issue as cable based internet services have, and wifi.. multiple devices sharing the same medium. As does CANBUS also. The good thing about todays ethernet physical standards (except for wireless) is that they are all point to point, no more multiple devices connected to the same cable trying to compete on the same physical cable.

Exactly!

There was nothing more painful than crawling around under someone's desk because they kicked the BNC port on the wall and now the whole string of offices is offline, so you're under a random desk fussing around with a TDR that says "the break is 4.7 meters from here - good luck."

So in the next iterations of hardware we are probably going to see more and more of the CAN busses going away and replaced with star shaped ethernet links. Possibly seeing some wierd protocols like CAN over IP to provide compatibility with CAN diagnostics tools for a while.

For sure.

SerDes is making inroads as well since things like cameras and other high-volume sensors are driving bandwidth needs well beyond what even gigabit Ethernet schemes can support.

https://auto-serdes.org

This is why Tesla cameras are all 2 megapixel, btw. Current in-car networking can't ship data around fast enough for higher resolution.

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