Firmware 5.6

[AnOutsider]

I played with it for a few minutes yesterday, trying to reproduce the circumstances where people say this happens to them. The neighbors must have been very puzzled why I was driving backwards in front of the house on a public road... that's the only way I could figure out to have the camera on and running while approaching the geo-fenced area that makes the homelink menu pop up... I also tried driving forwards into that area with the camera already on and then switching into reverse. But no sequence I could come up with caused the image to go black.
Maybe I just didn't try all the possible permutations? Can you explain to me step by step how you trigger it?

Well, I no longer live at the house where this mainly happened (in the new home, I programmed homelink further away so that the door would be open by the time I pulled up), but here is how it happened:

1) Sitting in garage in car. Media on bottom screen, camera on top screen.
2) Open garage door, put car in reverse
3) Begin reversing out the garage.
4) After I left the garage and got halfway down my (short) driveway, the point at which homelink usually pops up is reached.
5) At this point, homelink pops down, pushing the floating camera dialog down and turning it gray (or black, I forget which).

If the bug still exists, I should be able to reproduce it by backing down my current driveway to the point that I have homelink programmed from.

 

[AnOutsider]

On 4.5 just put the cam on and pulled down the home link menu

 

[ken830]

It's been discussed many times before over the course of several firmware versions. But the basic thing is that the video is probably a hardware overlay, and absolutely NOTHING can be displayed over the video. If anything is drawn over the video, like the homelink/profile pull-downs, then it will blank-out. Tesla tried to solve this by shifting the video image down when the pull-down menus open, but it seems they have not covered 100% of the cases. This is also the reason why the touchscreen CPU is unable to simply "draw" guidance lines over the rear camera video.

 

[apacheguy]

This is also the reason why the touchscreen CPU is unable to simply "draw" guidance lines over the rear camera video.

How does this differ from the setup in other cars with guidance lines? Do they not employ a "hardware overlay"? What is the other option? Seems interesting to me that Tesla would have made it difficult on themselves to support guidance lines in a future release.

 

[mnx]

All I know is that 4.4 didn't have this problem while 4.5 does. Does 5.0 or 5.6 have this problem?

It's been discussed many times before over the course of several firmware versions. But the basic thing is that the video is probably a hardware overlay, and absolutely NOTHING can be displayed over the video. If anything is drawn over the video, like the homelink/profile pull-downs, then it will blank-out. Tesla tried to solve this by shifting the video image down when the pull-down menus open, but it seems they have not covered 100% of the cases. This is also the reason why the touchscreen CPU is unable to simply "draw" guidance lines over the rear camera video.

 

[elreydetodo]

All I know is that 4.4 didn't have this problem while 4.5 does. Does 5.0 or 5.6 have this problem?

In the linux driver world, there are multiple ways to get a hardware-decoded video rendering on a screen. In 4.4, they were probably using a software overlay (camera "sees", hardware driver in the kernel decodes things, software in "userspace" gets the camera image output, software draws it into a window, compositor renders a frame with the content of each window in their current state to a screen buffer back in the kernel, driver draws composited image to the display). Notice that step involes being in the kernel, then out of the kernel, then back in the kernel again. That's several memory copy operations of an HD image which is changing at a high frame rate. They probably had problems with camera jitter (dropping frames, frames out of order, tearing effects), so they switch to a hardware overlay (compositor leaves a hole in the rendered output, camera driver decodes in the kernel, camera's driver directly writes a portion of the screen content into the scan-out buffer). Hardware overlays skip at least two major memory copies, making frame delivery more reliable.

As a few people said, there are definitely problems with this sort of thing, namely that the compositor doesn't have control of a square space on your screen. If it tries to draw in that area (a menu, for example), weird visual artefacts will occur.

I suspect this is likely to be a "problem" with the state of performance of nVidia's tegra video driver for linux. I bet Tesla has been in contact with them about the issue, or they are working on other means to return to software overlay. Compositing the whole display output is just much more flexible all around.

This sort of issue will probably be resolved by a firmware upgrade in the future. It's probably solved by a combination of upgrading the kernel, X, and the nvidia graphics driver.

Make sure you let ownership know you're having the problem though.. there's always a chance you're the only one that noticed it ;-)

 

[ken830]

It's been a long time, but if I recall, even in 4.4, they couldn't write anything over the video box. They had to move the box. I simply have never, ever seen anything drawn over the video box. This includes the Homelink menu, the User Profiles menu, the temperature/sync pop-up, etc...

Other vehicle manufacturers have a camera system that is specifically designed for vehicle use, so all of that was probably designed-in. Tesla's solution uses a more generic PC/Linux platform. It might be a limitation of Nvidia's Tegra platform, so I don't know if there will be a purely software solution...

 

[AnOutsider]

My car was pushed an update sometime during the night. It's installing now... we shall see if it's 5.6

 

[mnx]

My car was pushed an update sometime during the night. It's installing now... we shall see if it's 5.6

much excitment! .....

 

[zax123]

My car was pushed an update sometime during the night. It's installing now... we shall see if it's 5.6

And you're on 4.5 now (before update) right?

 

[mnx]

And you're on 4.5 now (before update) right?

Quite sure he is. (see post #142 for example.) Did I mention the anticipation is killing me?

 

[zax123]

Quite sure he is. (see post #142 for example.) Did I mention the anticipation is killing me?

We really need to get lives.

 

[AnOutsider]

Yup went from 4.5 to 5.6

Also as expected I can disable the energy saving mode

 

[zax123]

Yup went from 4.5 to 5.6

Awesome! That's the first to go from 4.x to 5.6 no? And you're not a beta tester right?

 

[AnOutsider]

Awesome! That's the first to go from 4.x to 5.6 no? And you're not a beta tester right?

I don't know if I'm the first, but def not a beta tester (as far as I know)

 

[gg_got_a_tesla]

I don't know if I'm the first, but def not a beta tester (as far as I know)

AO complained too much about the WiFi feature for Tesla to put up with :tongue:

 

[apacheguy]

Yup went from 4.5 to 5.6

Awesome!

 

[AnOutsider]

AO complained too much about the WiFi feature for Tesla to put up with :tongue:

ha. doubt I'll even use it for anything other than to get early updates. I wasn't even in a huge rush for this release. Now those map updates.... THOSE I can get with.

 

[efusco]

Had to run out to my car to see if the update was ready... no such love yet.

On the positive side, we have a huge rain system moving in and I discovered that the driver's side rear window was rolled half-way down! I assume I left it down, but don't remember putting it down. Would not have enjoyed finding a soaked back seat this afternoon.

 

[Denarius]

Had to run out to my car to see if the update was ready... no such love yet.

Me too.