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Chestnut – eGPU dock with open-source firmware
- ncr100 2mo ago[flagged]
- socratics 2mo agoI find comma.ai’s work pretty fascinating compared to the bigger fish in the self-driving world. There’s something quite human about it versus the Waymo’s and Tesla’s of the world.
- itomato 2mo agoIf you liked that, you should look into tinygrad
- shrinks99 2mo agoIf you're like me and also wondered "huh, what's tinygrad up to?" apparently they now let you place $100,000 USD pre-orders on a $10M shipping container full of GPUs which they say will ship (literally it seems) in 2027.
- Numerlor 2mo agoThey're claiming a lot, but don't have much to show for it
- jereees 2mo agoDid they have an actual metal container sitting outside their office building in San Diego? I would love to see it on the inside kinda like a walk-in tour you get from real estate listings
- latchkey 2mo agohe bought an empty container and he's looking for someone to build it out. i ran 7MW and 20,000 gpus in containers in WA for mining eth for many years. it is a bad idea that he's trying to do. but george is george and the hype is real...
- 3eb7988a1663 2mo agoDo you have a write-up of this? I enjoy seeing these Playstation/ASIC/GPU mining installations which are usually some combination of incredibly clever engineering and duct tape.
- latchkey 2mo agoi ran 20k of those bc-250's too... but those were in a real dc. nice to see them getting use again. sorry, no writeup other than what i've posted already.
- eikonoklastess 2mo agoactually they arent claiming much. and they already are doing better than 99% of other companies by having a buy button on their product page.
- Bombthecat 2mo agoAre they planning to do something like runware with their containers? ( Sonic inference pod)
- gip 2mo agoI’m impressed by tinygrad. Full-featured deep-learning framework with ZERO dependencies, fully hackable, and orders of magnitude fewer LoC than PyTorch. Want to run Qwen3.8 27B? Download the quantized model from HF, git clone tinygrad, then run `DEV=METAL python3 -m tinygrad.llm --max_context 8192 -m <GGUF File>`. Read the code and experiment - takes 1 minute. Compare that with PyTorch (great, but almost impossible to comprehend and modify, IMO) or Mojo/MAX (complex and not even fully open source, not to mention that the Modular folks aren’t particularly nice). Tinygrad is a breath of fresh air.
- LoganDark 2mo ago"Zero dependencies" except Python, which is a pretty huge dependency.
- haunter 2mo agoHuh intersting that that they don't support any of the european Stellantis brands at all, wonder what they do differently that makes them incompatible.
- reliablereason 2mo agoPresumably it is just that no one has tried to do it all the way yet. But i know there is some experimental work out there. https://x.com/comma_ai/status/1956879764829995394 https://x.com/comma_ai/status/1956879764829995394
- Gys 2mo agoFrom what I understood, when I looked into it a while ago, some car makers use an encrypted ODB2 (needed by Comma.ai to communicate driving instructions). See for example: https://autel.us/security-gateways/ https://autel.us/security-gateways/, 'Automakers with security gateways installed include Stellantis (Dodge, Chrysler, Ram, Alfa Romeo, FIAT, and Maserati), Nissan and Infinity, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen and Audi.'
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo agoNone of those busses are encrypted (at least not the majority I am familiar with). The security gateway is just a firewall.
- LorenDB 2mo agoToyota TSS3 is in fact encrypted; openpilot users who have TSS3 have to manually extract decryption keys from their cars to be able to talk on the CAN bus.
- rustcleaner 2mo agoHow abhorrent and disgusting of Toyota! >:^(
- hnbad 2mo ago
- rvz 2mo agoGood, something that is needed for running LLMs and other non-LLM based deep learning work that doesn't suck or has poor drivers / firmware for. I can rest assured that when I use this on any machine running Mac, Windows or Linux, I know it just works well with tinygrad.
- 47635274172635 2mo agoI wonder if it's possible to do link aggregation for x8 lanes to GPU. I have two thunderbolt connections available, each x4. x8 has minimal losses for gaming.
- bellowsgulch 2mo agoTwo things: 1. they have a cheap fuse (cents on the dollar) that’s not automotive-grade so your windshield mounted device fails in hot weather and doesn’t last past the hardware warranty. Known issue, doubt they ever fixed it. 2. 1B parameter model to stay between two lines. Why. Waste of time. Their product hasn’t actually changed in several years because they will never advance past lane keeping SAE Level 2. I suspect for what they’re selling for $1,000+ these days, could you find a way to do for half? Less than that? I mean after all, it still runs off a Snapdragon 845. Nice tech, disappointing limitations and too expensive. The world moved on, Tesla is bad but a Waymo competitor would be more serious than this.
- mft_ 2mo ago> 2. 1B parameter model to stay between two lines. Why. Waste of time. Their product hasn’t actually changed in several years because they will never advance past lane keeping SAE Level 2. Maybe... you're answering your own question there? > I suspect for what they’re selling for $1,000+ these days, could you find a way to do for half? Less than that? Genuine question: does anyone else anywhere sell something like this? An all-in-one retrofitable level 2 self-driving gadget?
- Spikeysash 2mo ago[dead]
- Yossarrian22 2mo agoThere are clone devices but nothing else I’m aware of
- dermacentor 2mo agoYou're not paying $1,000 for a cut down Android when you buy a Comma Four. What you're buying is an entry ticket to Comma-land — where dozens of car models are supported, pre-made harnesses are just a buy button away, and everything is open source. If George had chosen to go the closed source route, you might be paying $200 for a locked-down device and $200 every month for a mandatory subscription. Which one makes you feel better? Comma as a business needs to be able to pay their employees.
- serf 2mo agothe picture of that GPU installed on the side of the firewall tunnel reminded myself and my husband of a gadget they would have shown off in the original Batman series. "Golly gee whilikers Batman, what is this high tech contraption?" "It's a car tracker my good lad, see how sleek and easy to hide it is?" https://blog.comma.ai/img/chestnut/install_footwell.png https://blog.comma.ai/img/chestnut/install_footwell.png
- alex0com 2mo agoI had my C3X audio device fail a month or so past warranty. It literally couldn't detect the sound card anymore. My car is not supported, and I've been on a fork since the beginning. Few line of code changes to get it working again and it's almost two years in use. And yes, I tried flashing any and all available releases/forks. The sound hardware was not visible in the kernel on all. I've given up on the latest models and don't bother with the automatic cruise control. But just the lane centering is extremely helpful. When people ask me about the device, I tell then it's the next version of power steering. And if one has never driven a car without power steering, one may not understand how much easier it makes the drive. Thought about upgrading to the C4 as the original owner I could trade mine in for a discount. But the first thing I noticed on reddit threads were the C4 H/W failures, and that made me not want to bother figuring out what's needed to get the C4 running on my car. Wish they figured out how to bulletproof the device, would love to add the GPU.
- trebligdivad 2mo agoThis bridge - does it actually support host PCIe->thunderbolt->PCIe device - my reading of it is that it's just handling USB commands that the bridge is turning into separate PCIe commands to the GPU?
- gymbeaux 2mo agoMy understanding is both USB 4 and TB use PCIe tunneling. Surely at this price point we’re looking at a USB 4 device. Thunderbolt has historically cost more due to licensing, which is now free I believe, but there’s still specialized hardware and requirements manufacturers need to adhere to.
- clhodapp 1mo agoIt seems to support USB4 with what they call "stock firmware". They haven't clarified what that means, but my assumption has been that it's a binary blob made by the manufacturer of their microcontroller that doesn't support all of their fancy debugging features (thus actually turning my into an Aliexpress special eGPU dock with a high quality buck converter).
- reustle 2mo agoThe direct eGPU link if you're curious https://comma.ai/shop/chestnut https://comma.ai/shop/chestnut
- Gracana 2mo agoI'm surprised that it's pretty much the same as the adapters you can get on aliexpress. Not even a case to protect it from feet in the passenger footwell. Especially compared to the windshield-mount unit, which looks like a very slick product. I suppose they can always improve it if there is interest in this first version.
- buildbot 2mo agoVery much my own opinion, but this continues comma’s extremely cavalier attitude towards safety. PCIe connectors and GPUs are not vibration rated. What happens when you hit a bad pothole?
- adinisom 2mo agoSoft disengage -- if the GPU fails it continues to drive via on-device model, alerts the user, and then disengages. More generally, Comma's safety is handled by a microcontroller. The microcontroller limits steering torque commanded to a safe range for level 2 driver assistance and acts as a watchdog for the rest of the stack. Failure of openpilot causes it to disengage and sound an audible alarm.
- 14u2c 2mo agoI had a similar thought, but I suppose they decided to prioritize price on the assumption that initial adopters are handy enough to fashion an enclosure if they’d like one. Not a terrible assumption.
- Gracana 2mo agoYeah, of all the parts to leave a out, sorting out a little enclosure is certainly the easiest and most likely to require customization.
- snovv_crash 2mo agoThis article triggered my AI sensitivity. Had to skip the second half.
- ijsmtmmwiu 2mo agoWhat I tried was based on theory (I haven't seen real device), bought Oculink dock, connected Oculink to M.2 connector, USB4 M.2 SSD Enclosure to connect to thunderbolt, whole thing costed 150euros :)
- brcmthrowaway 2mo agoDidn't George quit comma.ai?
- amstan 2mo agoAccessing a GPU bar via USB2&3 endpoints seems novel. [1] https://github.com/tinygrad/asm2464pd-firmware/blob/master/USBGPU.md https://github.com/tinygrad/asm2464pd-firmware/blob/master/U...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]