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Tesla infotainment system upgradeable from MCU1 to MCU2

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#81
electronblue said:
MCU2 is much faster in everything and it is starting to show also in availability of some software features, such as you get Pole Position Atari game MCU1 does not get. I would expect this gap to increase over time.
Click to expand...
Technically speaking, Mars Madness (not Pole Position!) was running perfectly also on MCU1 (tested by @verygreen ), it was simply not enabled on the user menu.
And now Mars Madness has been pulled from new releases due to copyright issues (as I explained from the very beginning they where using an unlicensed Spanish bootleg of Pole Position as their starting point to develop Mars Madness, and on top of that they where getting it from an illegal ROMs sharing site!)
 
#82
@f205v Well not perfectly... enabling sound on some of those games is too much on MCU1... but yes I get your point, part of it is a decision by Tesla what to release on which versions of hardware (similar likely to AP2 vs. AP2.5 Sentry Mode).

Anyway, MCU1 does run those other Atari games painfully slow so MCU2 does offer a tangible benefit there in any case. And most people do not have access to rooted cars to enable what Tesla does not give them.

As for Mars Madness vs. Pole Position, Tesla does call them by both names in-car. I get it that the game is Pole Position with replaced graphics of course.
 
#83
@electronblue thank you for clarification about sound enabling on MCU1.

Regarding MM Vs PP, the temporal sequence was:
1) Namco created Pole Position for arcades back in 1982
2) Atari licensed it from Namco for local production and distribution in America
3) due to huge success of the game, a number of specialised bootleggers (mainly in Europe - Spain and Italy above all) created illegal copies of it on cheaper hardware and sold them to arcade operators at lower price than official. To avoid legal actions (the copyright laws on videogames back then where quite sketchy) these bootleggers changed a few graphics and some other minor details (mainly on the sound hardware)
4) years later Tesla downloads MAME, downloads a Spanish bootleggers ROM from an illegal sharing site, alters a few more graphics and BINGO! Mars Madness is on a car next to you!
 
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#84
f205v said:
@electronblue thank you for clarification about sound enabling on MCU1.

Regarding MM Vs PP, the temporal sequence was:
1) Namco created Pole Position for arcades back in 1982
2) Atari licensed it from Namco for local production and distribution in America
3) due to huge success of the game, a number of specialised bootleggers (mainly in Europe - Spain and Italy above all) created illegal copies of it on cheaper hardware and sold them to arcade operators at lower price than official. To avoid legal actions (the copyright laws on videogames back then where quite sketchy) these bootleggers changed a few graphics and some other minor details (mainly on the sound hardware)
4) years later Tesla downloads MAME, downloads a Spanish bootleggers ROM from an illegal sharing site, alters a few more graphics and BINGO! Mars Madness is on a car next to you!
Click to expand...

Good info.

I knew about the Namco background of course but point 4) about the illegal ROM was new to me (before your posts). Sounds pretty crazy actually but par for the course for Tesla, eh? :)
 
#89
Snowstorm said:
I care less about the pole position game than the sluggish UX, inability to use the browser unless sketchbpad is up, lack of sentry mode/dash cam (not sure if that is an AP2.5 or MCU2 req), and future capablities to come.
Click to expand...

Sentry Mode is AP2.5 but sluggishness certainly is fixed by MCU2.

And also the games situation may be precursor to other future features being MCU2 only...
 
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#90
whitex said:
I lost track of things Elon said are coming, even from 5 years ago. Just throw that one on the heap together with App SDK , battery capacity upgrades, unattended self driving, battery swap stations for travel, etc, etc. Tesla can't even keep up with servicing the current fleet, they are not going to add to that by performing MCU swaps.
Click to expand...

And, we are still waiting for Model 3 trailer hitch. :)

GSP
 
#91
Hood7 said:
Does MCU2 have better sound processing capabilities - specifically as to music (not video games)?
Click to expand...

Shouldn't have. It's a software thing. DSP uses a small fraction of the available system resources in modern systems.
But MCU1 has a different wireless connectivity than MCU2. MCU1 has parrot, and MCU2 has the Intel chipsets.

When it comes to bluetooth audio:

MCU1: FC6050W Bluetooth Module User Manual FC6050 Datasheet_V1_68 PARROT

xgJOYEa.png


MCU2: Bluetooth / Bluetooth + Wi-Fi Combo Module - LG Innotek (might be this one)
TWCMK005D Wi-Fi/BT Combo module User Manual LG Innotek Co., Ltd.
RBHAT223A Wi-Fi + BT Combo module User Manual LG Innotek Co., Ltd.

Well it has AAC too
 
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#92
One other benefit for MCU2: the screen’s backlight uses a much higher PWM refresh rate (possibly even delta sigma?), so it does not flicker on camera when dimmed down like the MCU1 screen does.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves with MCU1 aside from the fact that it can be very slow...
 
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#93
Snowstorm said:
The Sketch Pad is one of the Easter eggs that is basically a basic paint app. You can activate it by triple tap the Tesla icon on the top center while driving or through the Easter egg tray invoked by dragging down the top edge of the about car window you being up after tapping the Tesla icon.
Click to expand...
"triple tap the Tesla icon"?? Or "dragging down the top edge of the about car window you being up after tapping the Tesla icon"??

A single tap brings up the information screen, followed by the Easter eggs after a second or two. How are the actions above any different from this? Is it possible your extra taps and drags are just being ignored after the first tap, which is the usual way you open the Easter egg tray?
 
#95
Snowstorm said:
...In V9, the map is almost always full screen in the background, and it takes up so much compute power that the browser won’t work. The exception is when the sketch pad is active. It takes over the full screen and disables the map, so if you activate the browser in the lower half after the sketch pad is active, it will actually work as no computer power is spent rendering the map.
Click to expand...

Thanks. Then this workaround seems to establish yet another reason for getting rid of the V9 constant foreground map rendering which lots of owners have already and persistently asked for. Not to mention that the Tesla decided to have the map up all the time unnecessarily when it cripples the browser performance. Never understood the importance of their decision.
 
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#96
bmah said:
Regardless of what Elon said, or how much you believe him, this upgrade operation is technically not as easy as it sounds. If I remember right, the IC on MCU2 cars is different as well, because aren't they both driven from the MCU2's processor? (The IC on MCU1 cars has its own processor.)

Also, AP1 or pre-AP cars have substantially different connections between the MCU and the rest of the car (different wiring harnesses, etc.). I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's not straightforward. Also supporting a swap on older cars would create more permutations of hardware to (gasp) test, so I could see some software issues involved too (this as an engineer who used to be responsible for supporting hardware appliances with various configurations). I would love a faster MCU in my AP1 car, but I'm not holding my breath.

Bruce.
Click to expand...
From green on reddit

"there's no rewiring. The 4-wire cable that serves as ethernet on mcu1 is repurposed as eDP on mcu2, even the connectors are the same. So you just change two screens with computers attached to another two screens with computers attached (just different computers)"

Now there might need to be an additional wire for the 5GHz wifi, but who knows
 
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#97
Trebek1762 said:
From green on reddit

"there's no rewiring. The 4-wire cable that serves as ethernet on mcu1 is repurposed as eDP on mcu2, even the connectors are the same. So you just change two screens with computers attached to another two screens with computers attached (just different computers)"

Now there might need to be an additional wire for the 5GHz wifi, but who knows
Click to expand...

They also could just add another Ethernet port to MCU2 so they could reuse the existing ICs for retrofits... but I agree that just swapping out both screens is likely easiest.
 
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