spoon2000

Before I went through ALL the motions to do a data tether, I wired things up using a long ethernet cable between my home router and the car while parked in the driveway. I managed to download a bunch of Google Earth images and was able to zoom in nicely around the house.

But is there a way to force MMI to collect zoomed-in Google Earth images from other spots besides where the vehicle is located?

snagitseven

I've never read where this is possible. The reason the MMI is designed to only load local images is due to hard drive capacity. The images take up a significant amount of space. After the nav maps and operating system, there's only about 20GB available for all the data including songs, videos, cached Google Earth images, etc.

superswiss

You can move the crosshairs anywhere you want and then zoom in/out. There are 2GB of the disk space reserved for caching Google Earth images. Audi claims that's enough for a 4000 km route.

snagitseven

Reading on the last line, are they saying that you simply have to enter a destination then wait for all the Earth images to download or that you have to set the crosshairs manually for each area along a route? If the latter, how do you know where to set the crosshairs for each location along the way? In either case, a long trip download would take some time if at 3G speed. Also, I question that 2GB is enough for 4000km of display data at all zoom levels. I've seen my data usage climb when zooming in to an already downloaded image.

To Spoon, I'm curious, how did you manage to hard wire an ethernet connection to the car? I must be missing something obvious.

19hole

I had the same thought about the hard wire to the car....

superswiss

No, there is no convenient way to download all the satellite images ahead of time, other than roughly tracing your route with the crosshairs. What they are saying is that it downloads as you go and it temporarily stores the received images. So if you drive the same or similar route repeatedly, it won't have to request the images again. It caches them at whatever zoom level you are. I don't know what zoom level they assumed for the 4000 km. I have auto zoom enabled, so I have a birds eye view while on the Interstate to easily see the traffic ahead, and then when I hit surface roads, it starts zooming in. Even around my area, I notice that when it zooms in, it has to load the images at the lower zoom levels first. It doesn't cache them ahead of time for all the possible zoom levels. It also seems that my constantly changing zoom level invalidates prior cached images as I notice sometime that it's clearly requesting images again for an area that I drive almost daily. You can tell when the image is blurry at first and then clears up once all the data has arrived. Or maybe it loads them anyway to refresh the cache if it sees that it has a data connection. It doesn't say for how long it caches the images. It certainly has to periodically invalidate them and request updated images. Google recently improved the resolution and clarity of the satellite images and it didn't take very long for the better images to show up on my system.

spoon2000

It's been several months, so forgive me if I leave something out, but IIRC all I did was make the appropriate changes in the green screen (e.g. enable fair mode, DHCP settings, etc.) and then attach the Ethernet cable directly to the Trendnet USB-to-Ethernet adapter (TU2-ET100 or whatever the model is). I think part of the trick was using a hex editor to make sure that the SD card told MMI that MMI was supposed to look for data via whatever DHCP address the house router had assigned to the Trendnet adapter (e.g. 192.168.1.17 or whatever -- I'm sure it could have been set to a static address through the router).

At one point I think I also managed to get data and Google Earth images, etc. working by using a laptop in the car that had a WiFi connection to our wireless home network, running an Ethernet cable between the Trendnet USB-to-Ethernet adapter and the laptop, and then turning on Bridge Connections in Windows on the laptop such that the WiFi signal was shared with the MMI on the other end of the Ethernet cable. In Windows 10, it's Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network Connections > ctrl+click on the Ethernet and WiFi connections > right click on Bridge Connections.

snagitseven

After thinking about this and reading how spoon was able to get the data in via ethernet, the time it would take to download all the data along the planned route and dealing with the zoom level data refresh, it appears it would be more trouble than it's worth. If I plan on taking a long trip, I would just spring for a larger monthly plan with US Mobile for a few extra bucks and let Google and the nav do its thing. If I hit an area without cel service, I would just forgo Earth and use the standard map.

spoon2000

In all candor (and the reason for never going with a data plan of some sort), I have never TRULY understood the attraction of having the Google Earth overlay in the first place. I mean, it's cool to be able to approach a location while driving friends and to say, "Hey, check this out, this is neat" and have everyone ooh and aah, but in terms of keeping one from making a wrong turn, etc., it's a relatively benign feature. Maybe Audi thought Google Earth onboard would score them mad props from the techies of the world that would have a spill-over coolness effect on the rest of the car. I dunno.

The horse has been beaten to a pulp repeatedly, but I agree with others who think Audi's "futurists" blew it when they cooked up MMI in the first place. I don't know how far in advance they had to develop the system, but they should have figured out that people would be able to use their smartphone to do almost everything MMI does, that somebody would come up with WAZE (far more effective than MMI), that onboard Google Earth was more nice-to-have than need-to-have, and so on. And then forcing people to sign with T-Mobile was the final insult. (Putting a 5 CD changer in the glove box didn't inspire my confidence in Audi's trend watchers either, but I digress.)

The far neater trick would have been to come up with a widely-appliable screen mirroring facility that people could use to use whatever app they wanted from their smartphone while driving, control it with voice commands and/or steering wheel buttons or touch screen, and then let people have their fun. Those non-techies who wished to stick with a default package of MMI apps could have done so.

snagitseven

I believe Audi is heading in that direction with the newest models. With the implementation of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, they are on their way to providing a path for other apps to interface with the MMI. Not all the way there yet but getting closer. Unfortunately, I doubt there will be a way for us previous A6 owners to enjoy the benefits.