>Its driver door panel consolidates mirror adjustment, mirror fold, door locks, all four window controls, and child locks into a single networked module. That consolidation exemplifies BYD's vertical integration favoring fewer subassemblies, each designed in-house and dropped into place, with firmware determining how any of it behaves.
Integrated door switch modules have been more common than not on cars for easily the last 15 years now, and I don't think this in any way exemplifies BYD's "Vertical Integration" or "favoring fewer subassemblies" (these two things actually don't even necessarily imply each other!!). There are plenty of cars that use such assemblies and the companies outsource to tier 2's for the actual manufacturing - Mercedes and Valeo, for example. Because they don't actually take apart the module and look for, say, a logo on the silkscreen of the PCB, I don't think the author actually confirmed if BYD 'designs' (let alone manufactures) the complete switch unit in-house. They could. I'm not saying they can't. But... >Fourteen pins in two parallel rows carry every signal this panel produces to the rest of the vehicle. Automotive connectors are among the most common failure points in modern cars: corrosion, fretting, and thermal cycling work on these joints over years of use. One connector failure on a module this integrated takes out mirrors, windows, locks, and child safety all at once.
This just reads weird to me. >All employees want, in theory, to take as much vacation as possible. But they also all want to take just slightly less vacation than each other, to be perceived as more loyal, more committed, and more dedicated (hence more promotion-worthy). Everyone looks to the others for a baseline, and will take just slightly less than that. The Nash equilibrium of this game is zero. >Although the two-neuron network controller works well for a range of speeds, one thing the controller does not do is to try to dampen the instabilities that can arise when riding too slowly or in too sharp of a turn. (This would probably require a third neuron that isdedicated to this task.)
They say 'damping instabilities' but it is way more than that, because as anyone who has learned to ride a bike knows, the hard part is getting started at that zero point of forward velocity - how to apply torque to the crank at the same time as compensating with the steering to balance at such low momentum. It's not a trivial solution to 'damping instabilities' when getting going in the first place is the most difficult part (as any 5 year old child will demonstrate).
in the loop so that as this prints in a terminal it is actually readable; any modern terminal will scroll so fast you can't see the message in flight.
Slowing it to a 10hz refresh makes it look great.