Our Hardware Future
As many of you who follow us know, comma is striving to be as consumer friendly as possible. We built panda and giraffe in a different time, when ADAS technology on cars was brand new, chffr was still a product, and it was unclear what we would do to gain traction. panda and giraffe were built to be as flexible as possible.
Now we have traction! With over 1,000 weekly active users, EON has been a big success! And those thousand are still connecting to their car with panda, giraffe, and comma power. Today, with the introduction of our v2 hardware, this gets easier.
This is the car harness. It sits in between your car’s existing ADAS camera and the rest of the car, and allows, by default, passive pass through operation. The harness uses advanced relay technology to only break the pass through when the software says it’s ready.
As we started to port openpilot to more and more cars (59 models now!), we noticed the wiring diagrams were very similar, even across brands. So we built something universal.
The harness connects to the car with a 26-pin Molex connector. Instead of a completely new giraffe per car brand, you’ll just need to make this wire. See diagram below. We’ll be open sourcing the wiring diagram for the ones we sell, currently Honda Bosch, Honda Nidec, and Toyota.
When we have a Mazda port, a VW port, and a Nissan port, we’ll no longer worry about building a new giraffe, it’s just a wire. And with the lowered bar, if there are 5+ cars on the port, post the diagram to discord and it’s probably worth it for us to make. Subaru and FCA are coming back, with official “giraffe” from comma.ai. Even Hyundai might become official. Made possible by v2 hardware.
We have also built a new comma power. In addition to looking oh so much better than the previous comma power, it has CAN as well as power. From the OBD-C connector on the harness, you’ll be able to access the CAN on the OBD-II port. This is the magic that enables fingerprinting 2.0, which will use the VIN as well as the software revisions of all the ECUs in your car to get a 100% accurate fingerprint. We also managed to keep the pedal pinouts compatible with the old comma ethernet, hence a splitter should be all you need for a pedal. One steathly wire does everything!
And finally, the black panda. Included with every car harness purchase, it’s the latest color in the panda lineup. It has the same high precision GPS from the grey panda, but we’ve managed to fit the antenna inside also! Say goodbye to that mess of a cable.
We’ve added the circuitry needed to drive the car harness relay, as well as a fourth CAN bus for use with the main OBD can on the cars. And the black panda has an upgraded switching power supply, so it can source tons of power to your EON with no more heat related brownouts.
We are getting better. We are so happy to have you all with us.
