Chestnut – eGPU dock with open-source firmware

the 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

I 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.

What 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 :)

I 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.

This 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?

The direct eGPU link if you're curious https://comma.ai/shop/chestnut

I 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.

This article triggered my AI sensitivity. Had to skip the second half.

Huh intersting that that they don't support any of the european Stellantis brands at all, wonder what they do differently that makes them incompatible.

Good, 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.

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Two 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.