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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  5mo ago (text post)   770 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for January 20, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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I got a Comma autopilot for my car. AMA.

Well, is it any good? I recall seeing footage from a year or so back (an LTT video?), and thinking it seemed pretty solid. I'm curious if it's "Waymo-like" (you can pretty much stop paying attention and trust in the machine) or if the error rate is high enough that you're on edge throughout.

They advertise a 15 minute installation process and I think that's pretty accurate.

Basically, your car has a camera for its stock ADAS under a plastic cover behind the rear view mirror. You pull that cover off and patch in a wiring harness that lets the Comma override the signals from the stock ADAS and replace it with its own. Then you close that up, loop a wire out of the harness you just installed into the Comma device that you mounted on your windshield, and voila.

It ships without the autopilot software, you have to connect it to wifi and download it. This is pretty easy, though the process for connecting to wifi was slightly unclear.

The first time the autopilot software boots up it asks you to drive manually for a bit to calibrate itself to the way it is mounted in your car (pitch and roll angles mostly). Then you just activate cruise control the way you normally would, and the Comma starts driving.

Well, is it any good?

I am impressed with it. A solid upgrade over my car's stock ADAS (2021 Toyota Prius).

I'm curious if it's "Waymo-like"

Very much no. The device only has forward-facing cameras, so it is not aware of your surroundings, so it would be impossible for it to autonomously do things like make turns that require checking for traffic, merge or change lanes on the freeway, etc.

The way to think of it is an upgraded ADAS, like the automatic lanekeeping and assisted cruise control that comes with the car, except significantly upgraded.

(you can pretty much stop paying attention and trust in the machine)

The Comma has a camera pointed at you that has its own machine vision algorithm checking to see if you are paying attention to the road, and if you're not, it complains at you and turns itself off. So no, you cannot stop paying attention.

On the flip side, it is very trustworthy.

It feels sort of like riding a horse. A horse knows how to follow a trail, you don't have to micromanage it, it just needs you to nudge it sometimes to indicate where you want it to go.

When I last looked at it, there was no navigation. They had disabled it as an experimental feature, because apparently it was really bad, and the rumor was that they were going to focus on other features with no estimate for when it might come back. So it's not a system where you can set, "I'd like to go to X," and then sit back and let it take you there.

I don't expect navigation to ever be a truly solid part of Comma, simply because it only has forward-facing cameras, so it can't merge on freeways or make turns that require checking for traffic by itself.

The other complication is that navigation databases are so bad that they even make humans make wrong turns. Google Maps is constantly telling me to turn onto roads calling them by names that don't exist on any road sign anywhere. For example here in Minneapolis, a certain road leading out of town to the south is called "highway 65" by Google Maps. Zero actual road signs call it that.

Maybe an autonomous navigation system will have a better time just because it cares a lot less about what roads are called, but unless the navigation databases include things like which lanes of freeways fork off into which directions, it still needs to read those signs.

Is this actually legal? I'd expect regulators be somewhat vary of some code off the internet controlling the steering on a car driving over a public road. But maybe not, no idea what's the regulations are in this area?

You, the driver, are 100% legally responsible for the trajectory of your vehicle. It's legally no different from the ADAS built into your car.

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