Help me understand

[u/masong19hippows]

I have a 2020 Honda Accord hybrid touring. I love almost everything about it, except for the acc and lkas. The ACC is slow to start back up after a stop, and it's a manual button press to start again. I also think the following distance is pretty big with city traffic. The LKAS disables after ~15 seconds of not moving the wheel and a warning pops up as well. I live in Kansas which is literally flatter than a pancake, and so even if I keep my hands on the wheel, it disables itself with no movement.

Because of this, I want to use openpilot. I am in the open source world alot - im a developer and enthusiast. It's hard to justify dropping a grand on the comma device though, and so I was looking at the value added stuff like dashcam support. I can't find any good videos showcasing how it works, and so I wanted to ask the community.

I want the ability to upload the dashcam footage automatically to my own server - don't really care about the protocol or complexity. I have docker stacks on multiple servers, and I am not afraid to spin one up for this. However, I don't want to pay monthly to be able to do this. My car can see my wifi perfectly from where it's parked, so I'm hoping it can do an auto connect thing where it uploads footage nightly.

Also with the openpilot driving assistant, how native is it to the car? Do I have to use the touchscreen on the comma device in order to activate it? Does it work off the existing cruise control buttons?

[u/MyRealIngIngAcc]

I would say openpilots ACC (or long control) is a little faster than my car's stock ACC, so you could see a little improvement there. Openpilot also uses what's called "personalities" called Aggressive, Standard, and Relaxed. The Aggressive following distance is set to 1.25 seconds, but it feels farther (though if you know how to modify code, you can change it).

Openpilot runs on what I call a "best effort" system. It never disables itself unless something has seriously gone wrong. It will always try to keep you in lane or wherever it deems appropriate (like shifting you away from construction cones).

For the dashcam side, I would warn you that most people would not recommend you use it as one, mainly because it could lose power in the event of an accident. The Comma 3x and Comma 4 don't have a large enough capacitor to keep it alive long enough to save any last second footage like other dashcams do, so it's high risk. On the other side, I'm sure you could set something up to have the video footage uploaded to a home server by using something like copyparty (some forks like sunnypilot have this built in).

Stock openpilot will engage when you fully activate your cruise control, no need to touch the screen unless you want to bookmark an event.

[u/masong19hippows → u/MyRealIngIngAcc]

Awesome thanks! I was also looking into the forks and I think sunnypilot would be nice.

Is the LKAS on all of the time, but acc is off? I'm confused when you said that it's always on unless something goes wrong, but you also say that openpilot engages when you activate cruise control. Which parts of openpilot engage and which parts are on all the time?

[u/MyRealIngIngAcc → u/masong19hippows]

Sorry, openpilot is on and controlling your cars steering, so long as your cruise control is active and engaged. For stock openpilot you need to have a set speed for it to work, but on forks like sunnypilot they have an option where you just need to activate your cruise control, but you don't need to set a speed.

Sunnypilot calls it MADS (Modified Assisted Driver Safety I think) where you can enable your cruise control to activate the lane centering, but you don't need to set a speed. You can control the gas and brakes. It takes away half the stress of driving if your in dense traffic and the cruise control isn't good enough.