5 ms·

Heh, I graduated as a mechatronics engineer(so my education leans mostly towards the mechanical Eng. side) and wound up as a firmware engineer for the auto indu

Heh, I graduated as a mechatronics engineer(so my education leans mostly towards the mechanical Eng. side) and wound up as a firmware engineer for the auto industry. These days I'm quite staggered, frankly, how inefficient the auto industry is at writing good firmware and would love the chance to chip at something more useful than what I'm doing right now. I was asking what you wound up doing afterwards because I was personally curious what career trajectory one can expect going from such cool projects.(esp at that time) It's really curious how this bit of history isn't that well known. I've only just heard about it 3 days ago. Since they have been working at it since the 80's, I would have expected Daimler to have the lead in the sdc game. How brilliant were the people working on it at the time? How come they didn't try to hit the market with what they had? I guess it wasn't feasible in '92, but I see the project running till' at least 2005, so I guess they could have tried putting some commercial applications of it out.

sokoloff 11y ago
Hardware cost (and size/power) was the big issue. VITA-2 was literally a 9m+ bus and was jammed full of equipment. It surely wasn't a limit of brilliance (but like anything, hard and well-directed work is a crucial ingredient). I believe that you could directly trace some of the lab work our group did to Distronic (adaptive cruise control) and Parktronic (parking assist) in Mercedes road cars over the years. I doubt any of my personal work can be directly traced to a shipping feature in a production car, but I still learned a ton (and I believe contributed a lot as well). I'd love to learn more about auto firmware, especially as I've gotten into hardware and electronics a bit more as a hobbyist, but my sense is that the auto industry cares deeply about COGS and that probably drives a lot of their seemingly inefficient decision-making. (Firmware writing is NRE, module and ECU production is COGS and if you sell enough units, COGS dominates.) I don't know you can extrapolate from anyone's career path, due to the insane amount of randomness in outcomes and choices, but if you're "good with computers", there's probably never been a better time to be in the field, especially since I'd basically do it for free (given what I do for hobbies). "The grass is always greener" is a very real thing, so don't be in a huge hurry to jump fields/sub-fields/companies assuming that it's just your particular company that has flaws. They all do. ;)
- RealityVoid 11y ago
  The thing idn't that clear-cut in the COGS vs NRE area. From what I've seen, the firmware for each car model is VERY customized and for each generation they're solving the same problems all over again. At one time I was writing some firmware and it was very fun, but it felt sort of pointless, since I'm sure someone else should have already solved that problem at least once in the past in the same company. So they keep reinventing the wheel, with each product, with each car. It was very educational for me, but I'd love that once something is good, let's build on it... make it better, expand it. It could use from more transparency or some (internal, in the least) transition to a kind of opensource model within the company, where the good code survives and evolves and the bad one gets left behind...

sokoloff 11y ago

Hardware cost (and size/power) was the big issue. VITA-2 was literally a 9m+ bus and was jammed full of equipment. It surely wasn't a limit of brilliance (but like anything, hard and well-directed work is a crucial ingredient). I believe that you could directly trace some of the lab work our group did to Distronic (adaptive cruise control) and Parktronic (parking assist) in Mercedes road cars over the years. I doubt any of my personal work can be directly traced to a shipping feature in a production car, but I still learned a ton (and I believe contributed a lot as well). I'd love to learn more about auto firmware, especially as I've gotten into hardware and electronics a bit more as a hobbyist, but my sense is that the auto industry cares deeply about COGS and that probably drives a lot of their seemingly inefficient decision-making. (Firmware writing is NRE, module and ECU production is COGS and if you sell enough units, COGS dominates.) I don't know you can extrapolate from anyone's career path, due to the insane amount of randomness in outcomes and choices, but if you're "good with computers", there's probably never been a better time to be in the field, especially since I'd basically do it for free (given what I do for hobbies). "The grass is always greener" is a very real thing, so don't be in a huge hurry to jump fields/sub-fields/companies assuming that it's just your particular company that has flaws. They all do. ;)

RealityVoid 11y ago
The thing idn't that clear-cut in the COGS vs NRE area. From what I've seen, the firmware for each car model is VERY customized and for each generation they're solving the same problems all over again. At one time I was writing some firmware and it was very fun, but it felt sort of pointless, since I'm sure someone else should have already solved that problem at least once in the past in the same company. So they keep reinventing the wheel, with each product, with each car. It was very educational for me, but I'd love that once something is good, let's build on it... make it better, expand it. It could use from more transparency or some (internal, in the least) transition to a kind of opensource model within the company, where the good code survives and evolves and the bad one gets left behind...