Toyota UA stuff.

[Sysman]

There are a remarkable number of things you can fix on a Series III Landrover with nothing more than string and gaffer tape. And the occasional dab of WD40.

bale band

for the authentic touch

That kept the top of my driver's door from flapping in the wind for nearly a year.

[Dearnla]

I suppose if it ever happens to me I'll have to appropriate doodab jr's Nintendo for use as a replacement engine management unit or something.

I have actually navigated the space shuttle back to earth by using my iPhone. The hardest bit was bodging the cable to connect it up, of course (there's no bluetooth receiver on the control panel....)

[doodab]

I vaguely remember when I was a boy, the throttle linkage on our family car broke and my dad fashioned a new one out of a bit of my Meccano set.

I suppose if it ever happens to me I'll have to appropriate doodab jr's Nintendo for use as a replacement engine management unit or something.

[DaveB]

I lubricate my trunnions vigorously.

I think he also used string when his wipers stopped working, but that might have been someone else.

There are a remarkable number of things you can fix on a Series III Landrover with nothing more than string and gaffer tape. And the occasional dab of WD40.

[Doggy Styles]

String didn't work too well if you forgot to grease your trunnions regularly.

I lubricate my trunnions vigorously.

I think he also used string when his wipers stopped working, but that might have been someone else.

[Doggy Styles]

I had the carburettor return spring break on me once. The engine soared to full revs.

Unintended acceleration on a Morris Minor!

I switched off and coasted to a halt.

No steering lock in those days, fortunately.

I managed to jam the throttle half way open and got home that way.

Modern technology.

Pah!

Something like that happened to one of my friends in a moggy minor. He used a piece of string to operate the throttle to get home, so I'm not sure what broke or came loose. Sounds like the cable.

On another occasion he had a wheel fall off it while driving down the road. A bolt sheared or something. He used string to hold that back on too.

His entire emergency toolkit appeared to consist of a ball of string.

Modern technology, pah!

[Sysman]

Remember the good old days of cables? If the cable broke you stopped accelerating.

I had the carburettor return spring break on me once. The engine soared to full revs.

Unintended acceleration on a Morris Minor!

I switched off and coasted to a halt.

No steering lock in those days, fortunately.

I managed to jam the throttle half way open and got home that way.

Modern technology.

Pah!

[d000hg]

For a safety critical app it should be an unbreakable rule that it compiles at the maximum warning level with zero warnings.

The slight snag is that to some extent lazy or incompetent programmers can "mask" potential problems just to achieve a clean compile.

Also, some warnings are to check you know what's going on... they are called warnings for a reason.

[zeitghost]

Remember the good old days of cables? If the cable broke you stopped accelerating.

And if the return spring broke, you got a wide open throttle

In those days, the ignition switch actually switched stuff off, rather than using a microcontroller & a CAN bus to tell something else to switch off.

It's all madness, I tell you, madness.

So, to sum up, there's 64Mb of this tulipe to control the throttle, using two processors in the pedal, complete with a shedload of compiler warnings that no one has bothered to fix and "to save space" it uses recursion.

Magic.

I'll stick to an Austin 7.

It's just struck me why stack corruption is A Very Bad Thing.

Auto variables.

Wot live on the stack.

I'd forgotten that.

(Like much else, sadly).

Which is why the PIC12/PIC16 is a pain for C compiler writers, since you don't have access to the stack.

At all.

Much like the MC6805 in that respect.

[Doggy Styles]

It gets better:

What NHTSA/NASA Didn’t Consider re: Toyota’s Firmware « Barr Code

Recursion in a real time embedded system?

Are they mad?

Remember the good old days of cables? If the cable broke you stopped accelerating.

[zeitghost]

Nah.

Coz it's got 12 bits not 8.



But apart from that, it's perfect.

The Power of Ten -- Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code -- Rule Ten

It gets better:

What NHTSA/NASA Didn’t Consider re: Toyota’s Firmware « Barr Code

Recursion in a real time embedded system?

Are they mad?

[DimPrawn]

Indeed.

As I tell my illustrious esteemed customers, you fix errors & then you fix the warnings.

Because of the sign bit?

[OwlHoot]

From the article:

# The standard gcc compiler version 4″ generated a redacted number of warnings (probably larger than 100) about the code, in 11 different warning categories. (p. 25)
# “Coverity version 4.2″ generated a redacted number of warnings (probably larger than 154) about the code, in 10 different warning categories. (p. 27)
# “Codesonar version 3.6p1″ generated a redacted number of warnings (probably larger than 136) about the code, in 10 different warning categories.
# “Uno version 2.12″ generated a redacted number of warnings (probably larger than 72) about the code, in 9 different warning categories.
# The code contained at least 347 deviations from a subset of 14 of the MISRA-C rules.
# The code contained at least 243 violations of a subset of 9 of the 10 “Power of 10–Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code,” which was published in IEEE Computer in 2006 by NESC team member Gerard Holzmann.

For a safety critical app it should be an unbreakable rule that it compiles at the maximum warning level with zero warnings.

The slight snag is that to some extent lazy or incompetent programmers can "mask" potential problems just to achieve a clean compile.

[zeitghost]

Unintended Acceleration and Other Embedded Software Bugs « Barr Code

64Mb to control the throttle?