M2M Day 204: How to become the next George Hotz
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For May, my goal is to build the software part of a self-driving car.
Yesterday, I completed this month’s challenge, successfully building the software part of a self-driving car.
Now, the question is… What is left to do/build in order to actually get my car out on the roads of California?
The best answer comes from George Hotz — who pioneered the DIY self-driving car movement.
18 months ago, Bloomberg published a video about 26-year-old Hotz, who had built a fully-functioning (more or less) self-driving car in his garage:
In the video, George explains that he only needed to build two things to create the car: 1. A system that could output driving instructions based on input data, and 2. A system that could control the physical actuators of the car (i.e. the steering wheel, throttle, brake) based on digital inputs.
At the beginning of this month, I called #1 “the software part” and #2 “the hardware part”, focusing my energies on the software. So, with #1 completed, to finish developing my car, I would need to address #2.
As Hotz explains in the video, in order to control all the physical actuators of the car, he simply plugged his computer into the car’s debugging port (just as a mechanic would do). Of course, he then needed to figure out how to get his software system to properly send instructions to the car through this port in real-time, but he didn’t actually have to do too much hardware hacking: The car is already designed to be controlled digitally in this way.
Not that I know too much about cars, but this feels very approachable (as long as I have access to the Internet and YouTube). If I had another month, and, more importantly, a car, this would be the natural next step.
Basically, it seems that the end-to-end self-driving car isn’t that mythical after all. George Hotz helped show everyone, including myself, that the self-driving car space isn’t only accessible to companies like Google, but to reasonably casual hobbyists.
Since the release of the Bloomberg video, many small teams are now working on self-driving cars and related services, and this is likely to speed up significantly in the next year or so.
Hopefully, I’ve played a very minor role in this story, continuing to demonstrate the accessibility of this technology…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
