Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Twelve Thousand Miles in an Electric Car

· 1 comment · 1,600 words · Viewed ~1,635 times

I've spent an entire year driving the BMW i3 Electric Car. This is a long-ish term review which is intended to reflect my experience with the car and the UK's charging infrastructure. I spent three days a week commuting between Slough and Oxford, on a mix of motorways and quieter streets. I drove all the way to Norwich and back, and made regular trips into London. The UK's charging…

BMW *are* complying with the GPL

· 2 comments · 2,500 words · Viewed ~35,017 times

The good news follow-up rarely gets as much attention as the original bad-news story. Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW's compliance with the licence terms. I took a look through the car's user interface and, hidden away, was…

BMW and the GPL

· 8 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~10,867 times

I accidentally caused a little brouhaha last week - for which I would like to apologise. In my blog post about BMW's unencrypted software updates, I said: Judging from the files, it would appear that the infotainment system is made by Magneti Marelli with components by Wind River, AutoSAR, and Nvidia Tegra. Looking at the copious mentions of systemd and freedesktop it's a Linux system! …

BMW are sending their software updates unencrypted

· 7 comments · 950 words · Viewed ~15,745 times

The BMW i3 is an amazing electric car - let down by very shoddy software. That's a huge problem - software runs our lives and, if it is defective, it can ruin us. We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris…

Reverse Engineering the BMW i3 API

· 44 comments · 2,100 words · Viewed ~31,135 times

I'm really enjoying driving the BMW i3. I'd love to have it tweet its driving efficiency, or upload its location to my server, or let me turn on its air-conditioning when the temperature gets too warm - there are a hundred interesting things to do with the car's data. The official app has some of these features - but is slow, ugly, and a pain to use. BMW used to have an API available for…