[Tad28]

I'm just trying to figure out why Audiovox pulled the advance announcement of their XM link from the Web site, and why Blitzsafe would say that "BMW interfaces are our most popular sellers" but not produce one for the new buss even after a year.

[steve40704]

from what i can tell, it is just a very sophisticated system that requires a lot of R&D. The equipment alone to development a device that interacts on a fiber network would be quite an investment, ie we couldnt putt around on a weekend and build a circuit like a handy person could w/ a blitzsafe type processor. sirius was obviously able to do it w/ the BMW partnership, and the protocols are widely available. I imagine trying to build a device when the car is essentially a black box is prohibitive. Without bmw cooperation i am not sure it is possible. If someone can do it they will make a bundle. I keep hoping audiovox at least follows through w/ their RDS device but who knows..

[JSpira]

I'm guessing that you have to pay a license fee to MOST and that may be one obstacle.

A second, more practical obstacle is that you need to be able to code the car for whatever you attach to the bus. I don't think you'll see dealers able to do this for non-BMW devices, both because generally BMW dealers don't do that sort of thing and also because BMW's systems don't support it.

[glamprecht]

No, MOST is open (at least the initial intention) and is reasonably inexpensive to "plug into" Oasis chips are in the $5-$10 range. Test equipment about $500 from various suppliers like Vector. It is not rocket science like many people believe. Actually a bit less effort to get going than CAN.

You could almost call MOST the USB for cars. You should (in theory) be able to "plug in" a video, audio input/output/control anywhere and it should start working like a USB mouse would in Windows. I-drive runs Windows CE with 4 processors.

I guess people were afraid of Win 95 also in 1994.

MOST is used now by BMW, Benz and I believe Audi with others to follow.

[steve40704]

wow, I know it was an open spec but didnt realize test equipment was so cheap. almost low enough to make me curious... anyway, here is the specs & function calls for anyone interested:

http://www.mostcooperation.com/downl...pecifications/

[ted_bullo]

Originally Posted by steve40704

wow, I know it was an open spec but didnt realize test equipment was so cheap. almost low enough to make me curious... anyway, here is the specs & function calls for anyone interested:

http://www.mostcooperation.com/downl...pecifications/

It isn't really that cheap. You would need an optolyser which is at least 5K or possibly the PCI card which is about half this. This is just to get you started.

And although the chips might be $5 the optic transciever is twice this, you then need the software to run it which _IS_ expensive.

After you have all of this you will then spend the next few years if you are a beginner trying to get your platform stable on the ring and trying to dechiper messages that are not in the specification and are manufacturer proprietary messages.

I would expect that the budget of trying to get a MOST platform running with hardware and software expertise would cost hundreds of thousands and is probably closer to the million mark.

[JSpira]

Originally Posted by ted_bullo

I would expect that the budget of trying to get a MOST platform running with hardware and software expertise would cost hundreds of thousands and is probably closer to the million mark.

This is why there is somewhat of a barrier to entry for creating accessories that attach to the MOST bus. That plus the fact that the dealer needs to code the accessories so the bus recognizes them.