Poor Man's AutoPilot Enabled on BMW i3 Traffic Jam Assist

all right ladies welcome back to another installment of Jillian's random projects I wanted to bring you back and let you in on some of the developments have been happening in the i3 coding community there are a number of us folks online that we're trying to get ahold of a European steering wheel and some of the canned messages to enable what they call BMWs calling traffic jam assist which is really just a less feature-rich autopilot if you will it was enabled for the European market but then disabled for the American market probably because we're super litigious and we like to tinker with things versus the rule-followers in the European Union so that brings us to today so my interest in debugging this thing to see if it was possible to enable since I have it has all the same hardware up top it's got it's got the same camera my best guess was that it was just a software things I went in and enabled all the pieces that had something to do with traffic jam assist or tja in this case and when I did I got a bunch of error messages and things like that and so I figured there's something else missing and sure enough there was a different steering wheel because this metal rim around here or something else built into it had a capacitive touch sensor in the European model and the American model does not have that so I knew I needed to either get that steering wheel or fake the funk and do a man-in-the-middle kind of thing and just constantly transmit over can to say yeah he's totally touching the thing yes he's totally touching the steering wheel everything's fine everything's fine it's fine it make a little you know module that could transmit that so you know like a Arduino with a can module or like I think teen seeds can be modified to sort of bit bang and do the damn thing if what I'm about to show you guys if you don't consider yourself geeky or this isn't like a killer app that you just you definitely have to try and I would ratchet it up start slow and then work your way up and don't you know don't go whole hog and try and do lane-keeping in this thing at 90 miles an hour you will lose in court so be reasonable I got back into this because I learned that this company quitzel made that exact module so here's how you get it installed I have to do is remove this volume and button assembly here there's a single screw in the back with like a hex head and a side here could I have went and found my own microcontroller and gotten the code because it's probably you know readily available hell the guy might even have published it on the forum somewhere and done this myself for sure but then I'm in here like soldering things and I'm you know I'm cutting cable of cutting wires and things this guy's gone through the trouble of finding the exact connectors wiring it all up you probably have some sort of QA going on either in his in his garage at home or in China where they're fabbing the the PCB who knows but he's done all that work so it's totally worth the price of admission your time is valuable so someone that's done all this before normal couple bucks get this little module drops right in it's it's so tiny can you as you can see here it fits inside of the void behind the buttons and you just snap it back up and you're ready to go next step coating with esis links in the description tutorials lots of stuff about this don't do this is not for the faint of heart this is for you for people that you know like Tina Grier's stuff start with you know change adding AM radio and changing the the amount of fuel you have available to you in the range extended model mess around with those settings first and get comfortable with it before you go whole hog or if you just want this feature it's it's it's the again it's a killer app for you take it down to a shop and and in your area and you'll be able to get this thing both installed and probably coated you know for like a hundred bucks something like that so without further ado let's let's take it for ride alright I figures the the day I go out to try and test traffic-jam assists I can't find a lot of traffic to get jammed in let's see if we can follow some of these cars and pretend like we're stuck now of course I'm calling this the poor man's autopilot but that's because it's pretty close it's probably about percent of what autopilot actually does I think a lot of consumers are under the impression that autopilot is some sort of autonomous driving it is not it's just a driver aid it keeps you from bumping into the car in front of you and you set the speed that you're willing to go and it'll go up to that speed or slower if there's someone in front of you it also keeps you in your lane and that's about it auto pilots not taking you to Grandma's house it's not you know sure it parks itself but so does this car the reason I'm calling it poor man's autopilot this system is intended to be used up to forty five you know thirty five forty five miles an hour and no faster probably because they did some studying with the the amount of torque that could be applied to this the steering column and on tight turns it didn't do so hot you know and they also might have been some apprehension to to put something on the market and try and say that it could do more that it was likely to solve many solutions it's not it's just it's for being on a straight road you're you're going for between 0 and 30 miles an hour and you just bored out of your mind you ever do this for miles that's what the system is for but for a lot of us especially in the Bay Area here commuting on 101 that's what a lot of it is let's get this engaged and we'll see how it does [Music] human music I like well there you go ladies in conclusion the poor man's autopilot is it up to snuff no it's the poor man it's about 40 50 percent there it's it's not amazing but it's doing the job for that slow commute for the the multi mile stretch of road where you're doing between zero and 40 miles an hour you'll stop and go stop and go this is it this is the thing to get if you own a BMW i3 and it's already got the adaptive cruise control should you add traffic jam assist in the US yes no-brainer totally worth what this dongle costs so check the links in the description if you found this video at all helpful let me know if you hope to see more things like this from Julien's random projects make sure you subscribe thanks

Channel: JuliansRandomProject

Views: 100,300

Keywords: BMW i3, bmw, Traffic Jam Assist, autopilot, tesla AP, poor man's autopilot

Id: X-zD3MtDyd8

Length: 6min 56sec (416 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 05 2018