Rotary mode only (no touchscreen)

[zahitkara]

It would be awesome if we can change the AA mode from touchscreen to controller only. With controller mode you can do everything without touching screen like entering address, zooming in-out, moving maps, cancelling route. This will also helpful to people with touchscreen issues like phantom touches. Here is what i mean:

Touchscreen mode:
https://i.imgur.com/lEngnQx.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/eD3xTpX.jpg

Knob only mode:
https://i.imgur.com/EJFTCNN.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/FfH0nR8.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/L4UtZ8o.jpg

[bnwgraaf]

Big +1!

I would like this too! I am a big fan of the rotary commander and of Android Auto, but I hate it that I have to use the touchscreen again and have to wipe the fingerprints regularly!

[mishan]

The new Mazda OEM Android Auto does not support touchscreen, only supports the commander knob, and it works so well as it allows you to access every part of the UI which we currently can't with this version of AA. +1 for better knob support

[bnwgraaf]

Wow, that sounds really great! I would love to be able to only use the rotary!

[lmagder]

Yeah this is one of those things that having a CMU based configuration UI would really help with since I think it shouldn't be too hard to switch.

Speaking of the official AA: I haven't got it yet, but to be honest it's kind of putting a damper on my enthusiasm for hacking on this project more. 🤔 Do other people feel similar?

[Trevelopment]

Luc my brother you should still be excited about this because you know they are not going to improve on the official version to support touchscreen / HUD / whatever else we can hack up to make it better. Plus it costs $200 hardware upgrade so its now similar to hacking the navigation for those won't want to pay the ridiculous price. Is there a good way to de-compile their binary with IDA or some other way to see how they implement certain things to improve on ours? I'm not that great at that hacking aspect probably because of my amateur C++ skills but I think that would be the best idea to hack our version to be better than the official. Maybe that can get you more enthused.

Another thing is I updated my bench-top unit to v70.0021 but without the new hub and I have gotten pretty close to getting our version of AA to run I just cant figure it out because once it gets to "waiting for device to reconnect" it "crashes" with no error or anything signifying what happened. I said "crashes" because the process doesn't actually crash because afterwards headunit is still running but the connection is broken and it kind of keeps trying to reconnect a bunch of times until it gives up so its a puzzler. To get it to run I had to kill both services each for CP and AA like this: killall -9 aap_service carplayd L_jciCARPLAY L_jciAAPA before doing that it tries to connect but crashes before it even gets to register the AA audio streams. So maybe there is another process that needs to be killed as well or something. And if you don't kill those you can see that AA uses 2 MLENT streams jut like we did but CP registers like 6 different streams for some reason.

[zahitkara]

Thanks for all your effort Trez. I really appreciate it. I can use the AA emulator on my windows 10 computer. The executable file is called 'desktop-head-unit.exe' if i run this the AA screen comes with full touchscreen mode. Not any key from keyboard can be used but if i run the exe file like 'desktop-head-unit.exe -i controller' this time the AA screen work only with keyboard.

I don't know much about AA headunit source code but there must be a variable which indicates the car has touchscreen or not. And the headunit works with either touchscreen enabled mode or commander mode.

[Trevelopment]

OK so can we get one thing clear, when using official AA in the car does the touchscreen not work at all or just when driving?

[zahitkara]

It does not work at all.
Check out this video.
HOW TO: Use Android Auto

[Peck07]

Slightly connected to this topic: I am mainly using Waze on AA (unofficial :) ), worked like a charm, but now, I can't select the menu with the joystick where I can choose alternate routes / sound configuration.
So it's not only a headunit thing.

[zahitkara]

Slightly connected to this topic: I am mainly using Waze on AA (unofficial :) ), worked like a charm, but now, I can't select the menu with the joystick where I can choose alternate routes / sound configuration.
So it's not only a headunit thing.

Because it's working in kind of hybrid mode. Another thing is, after the last update they've redesigned the music player. If you are using the touchscreen everything is fine but if you're trying to navigate only using commender buttons good luck! You can't go back to music players main menu from sub-menus.

And @Trevelopment another thing i've noticed. Our modified AA runs at 60 fps. Don't know about the official Mazda AA but all of the other cars I've used which has AA runs 30 fps. This 60 fps can also be the reason for sound shuttering and video lagging with AA wi-fi.

[Peck07]

@zahitkara probably you are right... but I didn't upgrade the headunit, nor the AA, so the change could be only in the Waze app. Of course, I can reach that menu with the touchscreen, but that's not what I want during driving :)

[zahitkara]

I feel you :) I hate using touchscreen for any reason. It feels dangerous and leaves nasty marks on the screen.

[Trevelopment]

And @Trevelopment another thing i've noticed. Our modified AA runs at 60 fps. Don't know about the official Mazda AA but all of the other cars I've used which has AA runs 30 fps. This 60 fps can also be the reason for sound shuttering and video lagging with AA wi-fi.

Well in hu_aap.cpp line 468 we have

videoConfig->set_frame_rate(HU::ChannelDescriptor::OutputStreamChannel::VideoConfig::VIDEO_FPS_30);

is that protocol buffer wrong or something?

[bnwgraaf]

Hey guys, I am very excited to see you looking into "our" AA!
I myself are not planning to upgrade to the OEM AA, mainly because of the price. And even if I am enjoying AA every day, thanks to your efforts, I would like to see some things improved.

One of those things is that I hate the fingerprints when touching the screen, not only because they don't look nice, but also because they made everything less visible if the sun is shining directly on the screen.

Unfortunately I can't help you with changing the code, because my knowledge is not appropriate. But I can help you thinking about the things and share my experience when using AA.

I also have updated the phone app to version 3.8 and for the first time I have noticed some changes.
When receiving a message while not driving the car, the first sentence of the message is visible on screen.

The other changes are, as said above, some changes in the music player.

But I also noticed that navigation with the rotary commander has been changed and it doesn't work that good anymore, so I am forced to use the touchscreen more than I used to....