Yep, for now you are stuck. There's no update from MB coming as far as I can see. MB actually moved on from the version of MBUX in your car. You have MBUX 1.0. The new S Class etc. with the massive center screens have MBUX 2.0. There both CarPlay and AA are full screen taking up the upper half of the screen while the lower half remains available for MBUX functions. They really shoehorned MBUX 1.0 into the dual screen setup that was designed for COMAND and not MBUX.

 

Took a road trip yesterday -- 140 miles each way -- and observed a few things about the OttoCast. First the good. It looks great in full screen version. Passengers are impressed. It reminds me of the vivid image displayed when I used the OEM nav with traffic subscription. I use satellite display on AA.

On the other hand, using the controller to make changes to AA can be a bear. The dial allows you to only go left or right. Pressing it or tugging it doesn't appear to do anything. I have to use the the home key on the steering to move to control a new function (music etc). And then the home button on the phone to return back to the map on the main screen.

Wired AA the jog dial can take you to any function.

Fortunately, when AA (with Ottocast) starts it automatically starts with the destination option available in Google Maps. I have a lifetime subscription to SiriusXM and AA opens it automatically. But occasionally since it is streaming if I go for an extended period without cell service the music will pause and has to be manually restarted. That requires a number of steps -- home button on the wheel. Dial to select the SiriusXM App. Dial to select play. Home button again on the wheel. Select google maps.

Doing this while driving can be a bit distracting. At one point one of my passengers pressed the screen directly thinking it was a touchscreen.

If someone knows of a short cut to move across Android Auto screens I'd love to hear of it.

 

I had totally given up on this ever being fixed, and then last night just thought I'd have a quick check in case there was some miracle and found your post - you legend.

So I have a W213 17 plate E220, but I believe is the same version of Comand so I'm hoping this will resolve my issue. I know there may be some disconnection bugs but tbh with cable I suffer with having to unplug once an hour anyway.

I have the UX-2 being delivered tomorrow which I'm looking forward to testing. I was wondering if you had tried any of the other firmwares, including the ux-2 pro beta firmware and which of these worked best for Comand? Were you able to continue using all your control functions?

As an aside I was talking to Ottocast support and while the "pro" is supposedly a bit faster and better, you cannot downgrade the firmware to the UX-2 version, including older versions. So may be safe to stick with UX-2 for now.

Do the hard buttons on the dash for music / map etc no longer work with this implementation?

 

No the hard buttons take you out of Android Auto. Only using the home button on the steering wheel or the job dial allow you to move from one screen to the other inside AA.

 

That's weird, because it arrived yesterday and my hard buttons work perfectly, maps to Google maps, media to Spotify, phone to phone. This is useful as there is no way to get the cursor over to the small wide-screen panel, so it really only acts as a display and so to make any changes you do need to put that app into focus.

I did have to update the firmware via USB to even get it to work at all though. But it does work.

You're right that it's only the home button on the steering wheel that takes you to the menu row, and you have to tap the touch panel to enter as to begin with. Weird but workable. Other than that the jog wheel works pretty much as before for me. Up down and left right were always weird even cabled.

My only other critism is that while it's now full wide-screen. For whatever reason the device must be presenting a slightly taller image so it's ever so slightly squashed in aspect ratio. Not too bad, and will eventually be ignored but I wish it was true AR and square was square etc. If you compare cable to the device you can see the difference easily.

I should note I tried manually restricting the image height using the options on the aa dev options, but the display looks the same for all except the smallest option, which doesn't work my guess is that the device is sending an incorrect margin width (the amount to cut off from the set 1920 x 1280 resolution profile that's been selected). I have emailed them with this big report, but there is a language barrier here, and I doubt that old mercedes owners are their target for development. It's likely Mercedes fault somewhat along the lines anyway.

On the plus side though the ux-2 works fine even with the ux-2 pro firmware and interface for now and is actually far more responsive than than my wired AA was. And if it doesn't feature the hourly corruption requiring a cable pull then it will be a decent upgrade. I tried all the firmwares from the original to the new beta. All worked except the first (that it shipped with).

I should note I tried manually restricting the image height using the options on the aa dev options, but the display looks the same for all except the smallest option, which doesn't work my guess is that the device is sending an incorrect margin width (the amount to cut off from the set 1920 x 1280 resolution profile that's been selected). I have emailed them with this bug report, but there is a language barrier here, and I doubt that old mercedes owners are their target for development. It's likely Mercedes fault somewhat along the lines anyway.

https://support.google.com/androidauto/thread/85175002/wide-screen-not-being-fully-used-by-aa?hl=en

Another issue I had with cabled is it used to heat my phone up a lot, but this appears to be better thank goodness. This should allow me to keep my fold 3 out In the open and even potentially near fans to allow cooling while charging on long journeys (my office is 4 1/2 hours away so when I have to drive it's almost always an epic drive).

I'd give this mod a solid 8/10 if it continues to work reliably, losing points for the issues with navigating things on screen, and the squashed image. Also with the difficulty i had on first connection, many would have given up because nobody wants to be doing an offline update after installation and online update failures out of the box.

 

What's the process for doing a firmware update? And approximately how long does yours now take to boot up? Mine takes a bit of time -- more than it takes to buckle up, open the garage door and back out of the garage. Would be nice if it was faster.

 

it takes a bit of time I guess, but nothing excessive. TBH wired Android auto was never particularly fast.

It kind of does it's boot, the new UI flashes up for a second, then it goes to the phone select screen starts to connect and then a second or two later it boots.

Do me a favour, record how long it takes from absolute cold start to being on the screen and I'll do the same and we can compare. I have everything to auto connect also.

 

firmware update takes seconds, it's really easy.

Instructions here:
Files here: https://www.ottocast.com/en-gb/pages/software-test

 

Okay I found this website: https://www.ottocast.com/pages/update-u2-x. I did the firmware update. The booting process after the firmware update is way faster now. Plus it now shows the name of my phone on the screen. The hard phone key works but the others still take you out of AA/Carplay. I used the firmware link to send a message describing the problem I'm having with the hard keys and submitted it.

If they fix the keys I'll give this an A+.

 

Didn't realize you'd post so quickly. Thanks. I'll go back to the garage and do a check on how long it takes.

 

32.4 seconds from starting the engine. The garage door wasn't even up yet when it appeared on the screen. Way faster now.

 

That's so weird, my hard keys all work, map, media, phone. It totally solves the problem of having to use the steering wheel home because typically they're the keys I use to navigate those screens.

I wouldn't say A+, if you look closely you'll notice the image is slightly fuzzier because it's no longer perfectly square, and that screen squash mean's theres no way it can be A+ until they fix that. Glad a little firmware update made such a difference for you!

What model and age of MB do you have?

 

Out of interest have you removed the original bluetooth connection to your car, so everything is now through this dongle?

 

w213 2018. I haven't disconnected that. I will do that now. But the speed is so much faster now which I really like.

 

Regarding physical button mapping, then I believe that MB controls that, and the reason it varies for your guys, is because you have different firmware versions of comand.

my initial firmware version(the one that was installed when the car left the factory) had mapping that made carplay(and I assume AA) use physical buttons. So the map went to google maps, music went to spotify and phone went to the carplay version.

after I did a firmware update… this all changed. Now the physical buttons maps to MB map, mb music and mb connected phone.

I like this alot better, as I have gotten used to navigating carplay just fine with the touchbutton on steeringwheel or dial.

rgds, Jake

 

​​​​​​Nah, there's no way that's better. Not when you're using AA. Especially not with how difficult it is to navigate AA with the jogwheel and even moreso with the wireless adapter.

Even with wired AA I used those buttons loads, why would I ever want to use mercedes terrible maps or phone functionality?

 

Yes I'm stuck with the steering wheel instead of being able to use the hard buttons. And after deleting the bluetooth connection directly to my phone the boot time has increased. I may check today with my timer to see but yesterday I ran a quick errand in the car and noticed that it took far longer for AA to start.

 

That's so weird really? Maybe I should reactivate my car Bluetooth then, it's already fast for me but I could have it faster.

Today I did first proper test, 4 hour drive. Absolutely flawless. My cabled android auto would have glitched out 3 or 4 times.

I've also worked out how you navigate between screen panels without ever needing to touch the steering wheel. You'll never need to use hard buttons once you understand it.

​​Uploaded a short videos to show this, but also so others can see what the functionality is like for me.

Check this:

 

Tried this out tonight and it works as advertised. However for some reason booting up tonight took 92 seconds. Nearly three times longer than it took on Tuesday morning.

 

Fair enough, I was just assuming that AA was as easy navigating as carplay, reading your thread-conversation I can see that its not.

Switching to carplay would end your suffering… come to the darkside

 

Using the jog-wheel works just fine. In fact in less than a week it's become second nature. No need to change over.

 

Bought the Ottocast on the evidence of the video above.

Just got it this evening and so far so good. Only complaint is my dash buttons don't work and I had to do a firmware update to get it to pair via BT with my Pixel 5.

Other than that quite happy. Thanks for posting the video! It's great to have wide-screen AA and just on time as my Live Traffic subscription is ending this month!

 

Ah that sucks, it seems that ironically they removed the dash buttons working with AA at some point within the generation. Mine was an early 2017 w213 and so is still on old firmware, still at least the jog wheel works fine.

So a few weeks in now and I have had almost zero issues, no disconnects, no freezing, no overheating, no slow downs... The wireless version works faster (responsively) and far more stable than the cabled ever did in my car.

Also an unexpected improvement is that the voice recognition is also vastly improved. No idea why that would be. But the time to speak delay and the understanding is much much better, Weird.

I can only assume that this is really not so much Ottocast being good, but more MB being their usual slapdash self and just totally bodging the AA integration as we all expected they would and did. They just don't have the skills over their to get infortainment right. In decades of tech there's always something. Germany needs better QA.

Yes the aspect ratio is off. I wouldn't mind so much but I've been chatting directly with one of their devs and they can't even tell. They literally can't see that it looks fuzzy and that it's not a 1:1 pixel ratio despite me explaining specifically what they need to do in their implementation to fix it. I believe they're sending 1920 x 800 (standard) and the display is 1920 x 720 (fu Mercedes with your weird screen display size). So they need to send a margin for Mercedes integration but you try explaining that to a dev who 1) can't see the issue and 2) doesn't really care, 80% is good enough. That's so frustrating as it could clearly so easily be fixed but they're just not skilled or diligent enough to notice at Ottocast.

So it's a shame that we'll have to put up with it "almost" being a perfect solution, and with a very slightly hazy squashed screen, but you soon get used to it.